Make Cothay While The Sun Shines

Country Life can exclusively reveal that one of the jewels of the West Country is on the market

- Penny Churchill

This week sees the launch—at a guide price of ‘offers over £5 million’ through Knight Frank in Exeter (01392 848824) —of Grade I-listed Cothay Manor and its magical gardens near Wellington, Somerset, described by Christopher Hussey of COUNTRY LIFE (October 29, 1927) as ‘the most perfect small 15th-century country house that survives in the kingdom’. Looking ‘as though it had been moulded by thick fingers out of the soil’, the manor sits behind its own fishpond among the meadows and woods of the Vale of Taunton, little more than five miles from junction 27 of the M5 motorway.

Hussey attributes Cothay’s survival as a rare, if not unique example of a largely unrestored and unaltered West Country manor of 15thcentury type to ‘its concealment among the deep lanes that wind nowhere in particular from Wellington towards the Devon border’, and to the ‘lightness of healing touch’ of his friend Lt-Col Reginald Cooper, who bought Cothay in 1925, repaired the gatehouse, sympathetically restored the house and laid out the gardens. One of his more ambitious projects was to re-route the River Tone, which washes the western edge of the garden, to save his favourite pine trees from erosion.