To the manors born

Two properties, one in Somerset, one in Berkshire, would certainly impress Audrey fforbes-Hamilton

- Penny Churchill

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’.