LITTLE appears to have changed at Grade I-listed, Ston Easton Park, near Bath, Somerset, since my visit of May 1999. Its then owners, the late Peter Smedley and his wife, Christine, had decided to call time on their 22-year tenure, having rescued the 22,000sq ft house from dereliction and established it as a country-house hotel of some distinction.
Since then, successive hoteliers at Ston Easton, the name of which means ‘Stony East Town’, have struggled to keep pace with a fast-changing country-hotel scene, and the largely unaltered Palladian house, set in 28 acres of Humphry Repton gardens and parkland, is now on the open market at a guide price of £9.5 million through Strutt & Parker (020–7629 7282).
A series of articles in COUNTRY LIFE (March 23/30 and April 6, 1945) trace the history of the Hippisley family, one of whom, John Hippisley, held the manor of Ston Easton from the Abbot of the Augustinian Priory of Bruton and, following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, acquired it from the Crown. By then, the Hippisleys were well established in the Mendips where they already held eight manors, although, according to COUNTRY LIFE, ‘the permanent enlargement of their domains by this wide, sweeping tract of good farmland seems to have determined [them] to make their future headquarters at Ston Easton’.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 12, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 12, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
