Cothay Manor & Gardens

General information

Cothay Manor is a grade one listed medieval house and gardens, in Stawley, near Wellington, Somerset.In the early 14th century the lord of the manor was the de Cothay family, whose heir was the Bluett family, later from the early 15th century lords of the manor of Holcombe Rogus in Devon, also of nearby Greenham Barton.Built around 1480, its listing cites it as an unusually well-conserved, neat collection of buildings before 1500 in England. It gained four out of five stars in Simon Jenkins’ "England’s Thousand Best Houses." The rent for the land surrounding the manor in the medieval era was a pair of silver spurs and a rose. To celebrate the end of the Cousins' Wars, in the Tudor rose iconography of the time, a red rose (for Lancashire), and a white rose (for Yorkshire), were planted on the terrace by Richard Bluett, who was the lord of the manor at the time.The gardens were laid out in the 1920s by Colonel Reginald Cooper DSO, who was Sissinghurst Castle Garden owner Sir Harold Nicolson's oldest friend, having been at school together at Wellington College, Berkshire, in the Diplomatic Corps; and were friends of Hidcote Manor Garden's Major Lawrence Johnston and Edwin Lutyens. The gardeners exchanged ideas, and in Nicholson's diaries there is an entry: "Reggie came to stay and advised me on the length of the bowling green." Cooper's larger projects included moving the River Tone to save his favourite pine trees from erosion. Sissinghurst was laid out in 1932, with one garden writer describing Cothay as the "Sissinghurst of the West Country."