Asthall Manor is a gabled Jacobean Cotswold manor house in Asthall, Oxfordshire. It was built in about 1620[1 ] and altered and enlarged in about 1916[1 ]
The house was the childhood home of the Mitford sisters.
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Asthall Manor is a vernacular two-storey house with attics, built of local Cotswold limestone on an irregular H-plan with mullioned and mullioned-transomed windows and a stone-slated roof typical of the area. There are records of a house on the site since 1272 when Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall, owned a house on the site worth 12d. In 1304 the curia, garden and fishpond were valued at 10 shillings.[2] The core of the current building at Asthall was built in 1620[1 ][3] for Sir William Jones on the site of the mediaeval hall.[4] In 1688 the estate was sold to Sir Edmund Fettiplace; it stayed in branches of the same family for the next 130 years when it was sold to John Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale in 1810. During their 116-year tenure the Freeman-Mitfords made many alterations to the house including the installation in 1899 of an electric power system powered by a water turbine fed by the River Windrush.[2] The architect Charles Bateman altered and enlarged the house in 1916.[1 ] In 1920 a former barn was converted to a ballroom 1920 and joined to the main house by a cloister. In 1926 the house was sold to Thomas Hardcastle and was purchased by the current owner, Rosie Pearson, in 1997 on the death of Hardcastle's son.
David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale (2nd creation), father of the Mitford sisters, inherited Asthall Manor on the death of his father in 1916[5] and in 1919 moved his family there from Batsford Park. The youngest of the Mitford sisters Deborah, later Duchess of Devonshire, was born at Asthall in 1920.[6] Her sister Diana had an appendectomy on the spare-bedroom table.[7] The Mitfords were great socialites, and Asthall hosted frequent hunting and shooting weekend parties a with regular guests including Clementine Churchill, Frederick Lindemann and Walter Sickert.[8] Nancy Mitford's fictional Alconleigh in The Pursuit of Love is based largely on Asthall,[9] and family life there is described in Jessica Mitford's autobiographical Hons and Rebels.[5] Redesdale had never planned to make Asthall Manor a permanent home, and in 1926 the family moved in to nearby Swinbrook House which Redesdale had had built on the site of a derelict farm.
The garden at Asthall Manor extends to 6 acres (2.4 ha) and is listed as a Grade II Historic Garden.[10] It was created for the current owners of Asthall by Julian and Isobel Bannerman (best known for their work for Prince Charles at Highgrove)[9] and includes traditional gardens of herbaceous borders and lawns, contemporary parterres and areas of wild woodland and wildflowers running down to water-meadows by the River Windrush.[10]
Asthall Manor remains primarily a private family home, although the ballroom is occasionally used for functions and Asthall Manor's garden provides the setting for "On Form",[11] a biennial exhibition of contemporary sculpture in stone as well as small outdoor musical events.[12]
Coordinates: 51°48′01″N 1°35′08″W / 51.8004°N 1.5856°W
  | ''on form'' website - on form | sculpture: the showcase for contemporary sculpture in stone exhibited in the gardens at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire. |
| | Obituary of Diana Mosley - Obituary: Diana Mosley | Politics | The Guardian |
| | Famous people with Cotswold connections - Famous People with Cotswold Connections including Prince Charles, Shakespeare and Winston Churchill |
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