A Legacy in Landscape

24 June - 27 June 2027

A four-day journey through England's great houses and gardens, privately chauffeured throughout. Guests stay within Eastnor Castle, hosted overnight by the Hervey-Bathurst family with a black tie dinner in the castle itself, and at Kiftsgate Court Gardens for two nights with the Chambers family, with the gardens at their early summer best. Sudeley Castle offers a private tour of the Queens' Garden and Katherine Parr's tomb, followed by an afternoon with Lady Ashcombe, Sudeley's longest-serving chatelaine. The route also takes in Broadway, the Cotswold town that drew William Morris and his circle in the 1880s; Stanway House, home to the tallest gravity-fed fountain in the world; Daylesford Organic Farm; and Rousham House, where Ann Starling hosts a private morning tour followed by lunch within William Kent's untouched eighteenth-century landscape. An optional extension to The Championships, Wimbledon, with accommodation at Claridge's, can be arranged on request.

Day 1

Eastnor Castle

June 24, 2027

Guests arrive into Birmingham and are chauffeured directly to Eastnor Castle, at the foot of the Malvern Hills. Built between 1812 and 1820 for the 1st Earl Somers, the castle was designed by Robert Smirke - later the architect of the British Museum - in the Norman Revival style, its battlements and towers conceived to suggest a medieval fortress guarding the Welsh border. Augustus Pugin, designer of the interiors of the Palace of Westminster, was later brought in to decorate the drawing room. The estate passed by descent to the Hervey-Bathurst family, who have lived at Eastnor since 1947. The afternoon unfolds across the castle's 5,000-acre landscape - an arboretum begun in 1817, a deer park dating to the eighteenth century, and a lake formed alongside the castle itself - before guests are welcomed inside for dinner in the State Dining Room, and an overnight stay.

Day 2

Kiftsgate Court Gardens

June 25, 2027

After breakfast at Eastnor, the route turns east into the Cotswolds. The first stop, Sudeley Castle, holds one of England's most fascinating royal stories: Katherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII, is buried within its Chapel, and the gardens have been rebuilt around her memory by successive private owners, most recently the Dent-Brocklehurst family. The day closes at Kiftsgate Court, a short distance away, where three generations of women - from Heather Muir to her granddaughter, Anne Chambers - have shaped one of England's most celebrated gardens across a century. Kiftsgate will be the group's base for the next two nights. The first evening is spent on the terrace, with drinks and dinner taken al fresco amongst the gardens.

Day 3

Stanway House & Kiftsgate Court Gardens

June 26, 2027

The third day slows the pace and turns to water rather than flowers. Guests are driven the short distance to Broadway, the Cotswolds' "Jewel," whose wide honey-stone High Street once drew William Morris and a circle of Anglo-American artists in the 1880s, before continuing on to Stanway House, home to the Charteris family for five centuries and to the Church for eight hundred years before that. Its water garden, laid out in the 1720s by Charles Bridgeman - the Royal Gardener credited with founding the English landscape style - still holds the tallest gravity-fed fountain in the world, a single jet rising some three hundred feet above the lawn. Guests are received privately to walk the garden and watch the fountain play, before returning to Kiftsgate for a second evening.

Day 4

Rousham House & Gardens

June 27, 2027

The tour's final day turns towards London by way of one of England's most complete surviving landscapes. Rousham House and its gardens, home to the same family since the 1630s, hold one of the earliest and best-preserved examples of the English landscape style, registered Grade I by Historic England as one of the country's most significant designed landscapes. It was created by William Kent between 1737 and 1741 for General James Dormer, who had fought alongside the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim, and remains today exactly as Kent left it, with no later hand added to his design. Horace Walpole thought it "the most engaging of all Kent's works." Guests are received for a private morning in the gardens, followed by lunch, before the final transfer to London.