Inside a COTSWOLDS FAIRYTALE Manor HOUSE | Owlpen Manor

Alpin Manor is an idyllic Manor House hidden in the most tranquil of valleys in the Cotswolds [Music] welcome to the drawing room here at mapperton mapperton has been voted the nation's finest manor house but every manor house I visit is stunning I love the atmosphere and intimacy of these houses but what historically makes a Manor House a manor house so to explore this and much more I visited Alpin Manor a treasure of the Cotswolds and the most beautiful home to Sir Nicholas and Lady Manda [Music] wow [Laughter] um goodness me I I had to really pause as I was coming up looking at just the lovely view that you have here so we have these steep hills a lot of the Cotswolds are rather a plateau and featureless but here it's very dramatic landscape yes unless we call the Great Hall not a left great but it is the center of the house and what seems odd to some people is you come in at the lower end of the hall off center in early houses they have this thing called a screams passage which is where that Beam stops short of the beams with this big bearing boot so and that seems to take back to almost like people living with their cattle in a house you know a long house on the animals on one end and then and then in the Middle Ages Maybe the lord of the man who was here with tenants and they slept on the floor right and then gradually our modern ideas of how this developed where you have private parlors Apartments drawing rooms with drawing rooms at the upper end of the hall and the lower end of the hall were is where all the kitchens service rooms buttery Pantry funny things like that uh that end and here this elegant door case was built in 1719 so hundreds of years later you've got an idea it says in the accounts to Two Italian pillars oh my goodness you've got the Renaissance coming to the Cottons about 250 years after it finished in Italy or something if we were to date the Great Hall here well it's interesting the the walls are probably from the what you can call the medieval house and then it would the ceilings put in in exactly 1521 because you can date the beans by drilling into them and then you take the profiles of the tree rings and match them up with others in the laboratory under a microscope so it was probably built within a year or two of 1521 5023 and that marries in with literally the marriages of the family we knew that there was a marriage then and they would come in perhaps a bit of a diary from the wife right right yes and then sort of let's upgrade the house a little bit and it's been untouched since really that it's adapts very well to our living today I was saying that we arrived here just with one child two dogs two goats and a baby but now we can't fit around the dining room table because we extend it when the whole thing 28 people right so we're getting another one in including babies great fantastic but of course then you know this is then still a very much used and loved very room in the house partner kitchen the most used room in the house right when we're all together fantastic and I was saying how they probably had the court leet of the manor here as well they were official places these manor houses and the the Lord of The Manor would have presided over a little court right trying all this just right here incredible just right here through Through the Ages [Music] Alpin is the most astonishing survival of the medieval manor house in the 1920s it was sold for the first time in 800 years to Visionary architect and follower of the Arts and Crafts movement Norman jewson [Music] foreign were tied up with the Arts and Crafts movement rather and built these big houses in the 19th century which expressed that aesthetic yes and we got to know him in his old age so when he died at age 92 he left various things that he wanted the house to have like his subtle as it belong to Ernest Simpson his master and various sconces around the fireplace and the plaster work is very typical can you see yeah it'd be his little just sort of touch of its own time [Music] each room at Alpine has its very own special atmosphere which Echoes the historic changes made by each generation the house is very well documented for house of this scale so we know exactly how much the hinges cost and Nails fantastic and it cost two pounds 13 and six points to panel this room in 1719. well yeah but you you think what that is today it's a lot of money yes it is a lot of money back then but it's beautifully paneled this is the original painting above the in the Shell Hills and when we came here everything in the house was painted white gloss white and lime wash and right and we've gradually patented that we've painted this taking colors from scraping under the uh the paneling and you find little traces of the old paint and this in the Shell head so we did this in the what's mid 70s we came right right wonderful it's beautiful and I love it that you just have dotted all around lots of family pictures because there are how many are there of you now you've mentioned you you have how many children five children right we are 28 all together so 16 grandchildren I know you know you and your four children might get that I know that's right yeah joy to come exactly well wonderful this is absolutely stunning just to see just the difference between I can see a real difference and feel a real difference between of course the Great Hall and that period that year period yes stepping into here just one step in and I'm in a different 200 years later [Music] thank you [Music] and Justice is the case here at mapperton over time the rooms take on New Life [Music] beautiful absolutely beautiful so tell me what do you use this room for now and then what was it used before well I mean family dances in here roll back the carpet literally 28 of you yes everybody's just dancing oh little ones too you know oh yeah definitely yes all your grandchildren yeah how wonderful so this is your dance room let's say but really but what was this we call it the oak parlor for obvious reasons this is Oak it's got the date stone outside 1616 so we know it was remodeled probably where the medieval early parlor solar would have been and it's got the bay window and you can see all the mullions are drunken angles yes and we had a friend staying in the room above is essentially the spare room and you couldn't draw the curtains one evening and when the handyman came up the following morning we found that it's only being held into the rest of the house by cobwebs and friction and it's been marching away at the rate your fingernails grow for the rest of the house and you can see for instance my great aunts Bell pool thing there are no servants to summon now by the time with a five foot drop it's three inches away from the wall just at the bottom there so all walls in the house are at Angles [Music] foreign has such a wonderful and warm feeling it is of course a home with family at the heart and the mandas were the first family since the 18th century to raise their children at Alpin on a slightly overcast spring morning but determined to embrace the British weather we sat in this stunning Garden where I met hugamanda who is guiding The Manor into the future [Music] you've got this idyllic Cotswolds manor house and you decided it's also a business right so you've come on board Hugo in in one sense and what when when did you decide to open it up to the public or had it always been like that well our predecessors got grants to do roofs and things and the condition strings attached were to open the house in a very modest way on Fridays in June and July and right and they said kind of we'd like you to try carrying it on and then we had started having lots of children and baby it became impossible and we closed the house really and at that time the micro economy of the farm the estate was much more viable than today to day it's just a question of almost keeping it there yes yes but it doesn't really contribute in any way so we evolved towards it I suppose we started opening the house but by a bit and since then it's evolved more towards uh events weddings uh we have non-commercial things like concerts I I think my father's being very modest I mean um one of the important things is that is that my mother is an extremely good cook and um we had all this holiday accommodation and um it's you need more than just uh houses and so they opened a restaurant in the barn and my mother was the cook for for 20 years there and so he used to have the house open to the public and we did cream teas and lunches and then everyone from the holiday Cottage would come and have dinner and so it was busy all the time and we all used to work in the in the in the Tea Room serving teas and washing up and all the rest of it when we were children and we were room guides in the house when when we weren't doing that so we all sort of I mean for example on Easter Sunday we would it would all go and do lunch and then do the house opening and after that we did the Easter egg hunt when everyone had left right and so it was very much a sort of family-run little business which was trying to find ways to survive yes while also not putting so much pressure on the house that um the whole place fell down right um and that worked for a while but then it came to a point where actually I don't know how it is in Madison but Alban's almost too small for that sort of business to be viable so we switched we sort of pivoted into private events many of which are weddings because this place is my father was saying it it lends itself to private parties and the farm is basically unviable now but it means that you've got this great sort of shelter belt people can come here and be private and have a lovely weekend here and have a great time in the Barns and the gardens but um and that works really well and use all the accommodation so it's about finding ways to uh to make to just allow us still to live here yes um while not sort of losing the atmosphere on the heart of the place you know yes and maintaining this sense of a lived in-house at the same time yeah I mean I mean it's that's exactly right we've had to really continue to evolve um from the time that really the historic house had to many of them had to open up their doors especially after the second world war you know that's when we started to see this trend of historic houses opening their doors to the public so that they could still live but live in a different way but also keeping the Integrity of the house and as you mentioned it is of course finding that right balance of how many visitors do I want in my house because of the wear and tear and that's what I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand that having thousands of visitors in your house is wear and tear and then that's another repair bill so we're further down the line and how are you gonna you know how are you going to pay for that repair Bill well you have to figure out and evolve and come up with different ideas and as you just you know so beautifully put it's sort of looking at what works what has worked what's not working and shifting and evolving but the other thing is that the house is also the focus of a community and has always been and it provides jobs and sort of dynamic to the whole yes you know wider economy and the The Cottages were partly a thing of maintaining these old buildings which had no function they were part of the feudal estate when staff lived in in them or some were just derelict some didn't really exist and so we did up these historic buildings [Music] nowhere else better describes how a manor house was at the center of a community in centuries gone by and today the historic elements of Manor life at Alpin have provided all important business opportunities thank you foreign in England you have castles you have stately homes you have Halls you have courts and then you have this manor house and what exactly makes up a Manor House the elements around I think it's a very ancient thing with the Norman Conquest it was the Roman villa and it was actually a unit of administration this is what's called a Gentry manner which meant that the lord of the man who lived here the feudal overlords were in the big castle nearby Barclay castle and they had their own Court there was a memorial court and we have the court rolls telling of fines that they administered and someday inherited a tenant Farm they had to pay what was called Harriet to the Lord of The Manor which was like the best cow or something like that he'd say sorry I'll have that and all that kind of thing so it was it was a legal system as well as just a name and I think in this part of gloucestershire the manor house is often called a court this I I don't know whether people really at the manner was the legal thing really right and then here we have the church the barn the mill the Open Fields and the tops of the hills and the Cottages all the the elements of the manor are here including the courthouse which is a little building on the west side I think the thing that makes help and also interesting in that context is that if you stand on the lawn looking at them at the house you can see the courthouse The Mill House um the uh the farm everything that makes the manor is still here the church and also in business terms of the barn and of course Barnes whereas before they were just places where you would you know use it for threshing or storage now they're crucially important to these sorts of places because there are events venues and you can repurpose them as something completely different and now they're great for if you think of the wassails people used to have in Barns now it's weddings and disco's and conferences and all that sort of thing so they serve a modern purpose so the the traditional medieval manner has sort of morphed into something completely different but it still looks very similar to how it would have been 500 years ago which is quite fun it was I mean that is perfectly put and I think also it's expressed in the architecture so this isn't it looks described as a tiny manor house you a farmhouse wouldn't have been allowed to have say a bay window or an oriole window that was definitely expression of status yes and your coat of arms on the front of the house you see the farmers didn't have Coats of Arms it was it was expressed itself as you know where it's not a huge house by Country House standards but it was definitely the the house right yes for miles around yeah and it has the markings on it to say I am you know a powerful house relatively exactly [Music] Alpin Manor just like mapperton and most historic homes I visit across the UK Blends history and the ever-present need to be commercial so Hugo showed me the Redevelopment of the barn [Music] so this is the cider bun um oh my goodness which is a sort of misnomer I mean but in in medieval terms this was essentially the warehouse of the estate right it was the threshing room you would have there would be an open wagon porch there you'd have a through draft and they bring all their produce in there especially the wheat and they would thresh it and and produce their uh grain so that was the first purpose of it and we know from the dendrochronology dating that these Crux trusses were put up in 1446. oh my goodness you this family is very good at taking Timber and dating it it's incredible the great thing is that they had to have been building in Green Oak with these structures so it must have been built in that year or maybe 1447 so right it's a pretty hard date in terms of the there's about how you would build a timber frame structure um they would have been you can see here these sort of cross braces going across so people were much smaller than it will be quite squat oh yes I see ACC yes and it and it's obviously survived yeah is incredible that it has survived since 14 well I think one of the reasons it survived is because yes it was a threshing bomb but then it became something else right so behind us over there you've got the cider press which is probably built in the sort of uh mid 18th century 1730s kind of thing uh and what you've got here is you've got two vertical Oak structures is this the original site this is the original side effects where they used to build uh so this survived as well yeah this is incredible the the coolest thing about it for me is is this um wonderful upright here it's almost like you can see they've built the cider press and they were planing off the bark yes I thought halfway they just stopped and thought out to hell with this let's just go and make some cider we're done but I mean for me as a child this was a a playroom in on wet days right so there used to be a trough in the Middle where you'd pour all your apples in and create the pulp and then load it onto the press and press the apples and all that sort of thing but we would ride our bikes in here and we'd have our slide in here and our climbing frame and we'd just mess about when we couldn't go into the fields and climb trees right so we had no idea what this thing even was you know it was just a sort of an annoying piece of wood in the corner that got in the way of our games uh and then slowly you come to ask the question what actually is that thing what's it doing here and it becomes you know more interesting so that's why we call the place The Cider Barn because you've got this huge glumpfing pre-industrial machine sort of squatting in the course yeah it's unbelievable that is I mean it's fascinating just to see this and I think especially as me as an American when I sort of visualize a lot of the buildings uh here in in England I like to see the original Timber foreign nothing has really been done to it you've still got the dove kit up there you've still got the wagon porch which is the the now the office you've got the old Apple Loft which is a bridal Suite you know everything is just exists in its present form right so your level's been raised a bit and there's a wooden floor and that's kind of it really everything is right so you've mentioned Bridal Suite so you've obviously this has now evolved into a wedding space Oh yeah for weddings this is the dance floor and the bar this is a party room though so but you're you've taken over a little bit of the running of Alpine is that right that's right yeah so how did that start and when did that start and kind of what's your vision so that was about 2016. okay not that long um and we were getting a sense that uh historic Harris tours and cream teas and everything weren't really enough for us so we felt that weddings were all and private events as well right um well one of the ways that we could carry on now the great thing about Alpine is that you've got it's a valley in its own right so it's very private um so you've got a party space in the middle you've got accommodation everywhere people can hire it for the weekend and they can call it theirs and have a good time in the in the Cotswolds and also we you know we throw lots of parties of our own we love throwing parties so it sort of made sense you kind of do what you know so we we do parties so when was this converted this space into this dance floor that we see today well this was actually done in the 90s for my parents they had it was their restaurant and it was a licensed restaurant for 20 years and then we when we started doing weddings it was too small for the football so we had Marquis next to it and that was obviously not sustainable so uh we decided to sort of to scale up as it were we just said we needed another space for dining so that you could have two areas yes um one way you could have a dance and a drink the other place where you could sit down and eat so that's the barn next door which we built in 2020 yeah oh my goodness so this is the pole barn wow this is an extension Hugo is that right that's right yeah so traditionally the door would have been about this level they would have had a bank going up there and you would you would chuck in all your apples and grain through the sort of through the much higher level door right we put the level down and then created this enormous Space by moving a lot of Earth to flatten it out right uh and then then we could build the structure on it honestly it's really sympathetically done you know it it fits when you come from one from the well the cider Press Room into here well it was my father's idea he said if you're going to build a barn we need an architect so that they understand old buildings and they can they can get a sense of how you chime with the old and then yeah you've got a sense of continuity and change and he also said we need to use our own materials so it's as uh low impact sustainable as possible right and we had large up in one of our Woods this is all Lurch that all comes from our Woods how many weddings are you doing a year then so we're doing between sort of 60 and 75. um a lot it's yeah it's a lot more than one a week the thing is when you're employing lots of people you need to keep them busy that's exactly right so two a week basically two weeks and and that way we can do it in such a way that we can still live here we can still enjoy the estate for ourselves it's not turning into some sort of factory and uh people can also still enjoy a bit of peace they can arrive the day before they can decorate they've welcomed their friends to the Cottages they can spend a whole day here on their wedding day and the next day afterwards right um and we felt that was an article of faith because that's how I got married and all of my brothers and sisters got married in that way right um and we had this sort of idea on our weddings that what we would do is the next day everyone's feeling a bit sort of uh you know Green around the gills all go down to the lake have a barbecue jump in the lake and have a swim that was the sort of the the ideals yes yes and that's exactly what people do now so it's great seeing them carrying it on because you have of course you've got holiday accommodation here yeah so yeah the wedding party and guests can all stay absolutely on the estate but then you're mentioning a swim yeah so we've got the mill down there and Beyond it we have the mill pond and a lake beyond that so the idea it's all spring fed lakes so it's very clean water and people can all gather around do whatever they want and then jump in when they want to freshen up but it's just it's so it's such a pretty place to be married and also of course to live I mean this is the Cotswold just so idyllic picturesque britishness strangely this is this part of the Cotswolds is it's the folded valleys on the escarpment so it's the Lesser known part of the Cotswolds sort of undiscovered Cotswolds exactly wonderful well I think it's absolutely brilliant what you've done and you know um if I didn't have Matt for tonight I'd recommend one of my children to be married here when the time comes exactly not not for quite some time I hope [Music] Alpin Manor is a wonderful wonderful wedding venue it is so peaceful there thank you so much for joining me once again for this historic house visit what a treat it has been before the end of my time at Alpine I took a peek inside the beautiful church just behind the house and a focus of family life [Music] one of the things I do love about manor houses like yours is that there's as we've discussed there's always a church a little church yes behind the house and it's also medieval of origin but being completely rebuilt by the victorians except for the font which was found being used as a cattle trough and then they re-erected it building this baptistry I was christened in this film no were you really I said wasn't it oh my goodness four out of five children are married yeah four to five of your children married here Hugo yeah yeah and wow Crescent here as well yeah my goodness [Music] so this part of the church then it looks I mean it's very colorful and it says in the inscription beautified with mosaics to the glory of God or something um in the uh 1887s yes so they builted quite a plain Chancellor before and we've got all this italianate Neo Byzantine work which is a kind of arts and crafts yes principled on my man called Powell and white fries and it's full of color Yes full of color very richly texted church with wonderful stained glass everywhere it's quite good quality of its period sunbursts on the roof so it's special it's not what you expect is it a little yeah it's described as the richest Edwardian Victorian interior in a Qatar Village [Music] I hope you are enjoying these wonderful historic House episodes we put so much time and energy to make sure that these are of high quality Productions and we want to thank our patrons because the reason that we're able to create such beautiful episodes is because of their support so do consider becoming an American by Countess Patron here you'll get behind the scenes you'll also get American by Countess merchandise all episodes are ad free and you get early access to them as well Christmas cards and it's a wonderful community of like-minded people who also love historic houses as much as I do so do check out the details down below at patreon.com forward slash American VI countess [Music] thank you

Channel: American Viscountess

Views: 82,689

Keywords: julie montagu mapperton house, julie montagu american aristocrat, mapperton house, aristocracy documentary, meghan markle, prince harry, american aristocrat, American viscountess, julie montagu, mapperton, viscountess, viscount, Luke montagu, prince and princess of wales, the royal family, all things royal, royalty, real royalty, bridgerton, the crown, royally obsessed, Italian house renovation, restoration, King Charles III

Id: e5GemhponFM

Length: 30min 32sec (1832 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2023