Kiddington Hall

Kiddington Hall is a large Grade II listed manor house located in Kiddington, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, England. HistoryKiddington Hall was built in 1673, and in the 18th century "Capability" Brown laid out the gardens. The Reverend Thomas Warton, a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, who was rector of Kiddington for 20 years and poet laureate from 1785, pictures the coming of spring on the estate in his April Ode with "swallows skimming the village green and rooks swarming in the oak trees round the manor house". Estate owner Sir George Browne provided the real-life inspiration for "Sir Plume of amber snuff-box justly vain" in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. In 1840 the estate passed to Mortimer Ricardo, youngest son of the political economist David Ricardo. In 1850 he commissioned the architect Sir Charles Barry to remodel the house in his trademark Italianate architecture style, build a new stable courtyard adjoining the hall to the north, and create formal terraced gardens to the south and west, overlooking Brown's park. Barry rebuilt the house so completely that no external trace of the original building is visible. Beyond the Victorian orangery to the south, a gate leads to the square-towered 14th-century church of St Nicholas, where stained-glass windows commemorate the former High Sheriff of Oxfordshire Henry Lomax Gaskell and his wife, Alice, whose family lived at the Hall from 1855 to 1953.

Kiddington Hall is a large Grade II listed manor house located in Kiddington, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, England. HistoryKiddington Hall was built in 1673, and in the 18th century "Capability" Brown laid out the gardens. The Reverend Thomas Warton, a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, who was rector of Kiddington for 20 years and poet laureate from 1785, pictures the coming of spring on the estate in his April Ode with "swallows skimming the village green and rooks swarming in the oak trees round the manor house". Estate owner Sir George Browne provided the real-life inspiration for "Sir Plume of amber snuff-box justly vain" in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. In 1840 the estate passed to Mortimer Ricardo, youngest son of the political economist David Ricardo. In 1850 he commissioned the architect Sir Charles Barry to remodel the house in his trademark Italianate architecture style, build a new stable courtyard adjoining the hall to the north, and create formal terraced gardens to the south and west, overlooking Brown's park. Barry rebuilt the house so completely that no external trace of the original building is visible. Beyond the Victorian orangery to the south, a gate leads to the square-towered 14th-century church of St Nicholas, where stained-glass windows commemorate the former High Sheriff of Oxfordshire Henry Lomax Gaskell and his wife, Alice, whose family lived at the Hall from 1855 to 1953.