Ablington Manor

Ablington Manor is the Elizabethan house of Ablington, a hamlet of Bibury on the River Coln about 1.5 km north-west of the village. Its porch is dated 1590 and carries five carved royal heads, it is listed Grade I, and it was the home of J. Arthur Gibbs, whose book of 1898 its listing calls one of the first to popularise the Cotswolds.

History

Ablington Manor is dated 1590 for John Coxwell, who had bought the manor from Arthur Basset in 1574, and the Coxwells held it for more than three centuries. The Victoria County History records that in the early sixteenth century the house was leased to a family called Howse, and describes a three-roomed house with a north porch dated 1590.

The Coxwells

Two wings went up on the south side, facing the river, in the earlier seventeenth century, and in 1650 another John Coxwell set rooms aside in the house for his mother, Katherine. In about 1780, for the Revd Charles Coxwell, the interior was refitted, the south front given new windows and the roofs partly rebuilt; the space between the wings became a staircase at the same time. Service rooms were added on the east side in the nineteenth century, and a stable court is dated 1860. Charles Coxwell, who lived at the manor, was vicar of Bibury from 1806 to 1809, and the pioneer balloonist Henry Tracey Coxwell was his grandson. The estate passed to the Coxwell Rogers family, and after Godfrey Coxwell Rogers died in 1914 it was broken up: the house was sold in 1915 and Manor Farm to Lord Sherborne in 1918.

A Cotswold Village

The house's best-known resident was not a Coxwell. Joseph Arthur Gibbs lived at Ablington Manor and wrote A Cotswold Village there, published in 1898, a book about the life of the hamlet and the wold around it that brought Bibury to a wide readership. The listing calls it one of the first books to popularise the Cotswolds, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What to see

The north porch is the thing to look for from the lane. It is two storeys high, with diagonal buttresses and a Doric entablature on fluted pilasters framing the arch. In the frieze over its arch are five stylised heads, which the listing identifies as Elizabeth I in the middle, Mary and Henry VIII beside her, and Philip of Spain and James I at the ends. Above them a raised inscription asks the Lord to plead Coxwell's cause and gives the year 1590, set between two projecting roundels.

The rest of the north front is asymmetrical, with three gables and a mix of mullioned and transomed windows, and a gabled service wing on the left carries a small domed cupola. The walls are limestone rubble under an early roughcast render with a yellow ochre wash, which gives the house its warm colour. Inside, which visitors do not see, the listing records panelling of the early seventeenth century in the dining room and a stair hall of about 1780.

Look round the hamlet too. Ablington House nearby is a gabled house of the middle of the seventeenth century, and an early nineteenth-century bridge of two arches carries a drive over the Coln west of the manor. A barn of the sixteenth century, listed Grade II*, stands about 50m west of Manor Farmhouse; an addition to it is dated 1727, when John Coxwell was lord of the manor.

Visiting

Ablington Manor is a private home, so it is seen from outside only, from the lane that runs through the hamlet; please do not go through the gates. There is no entry charge and nothing to book. The lane is quiet, but there is nowhere to stop a car outside the house, and there are no facilities in Ablington. The porch faces north, so it is in shade for much of the day; a bright, overcast day shows the carving best.

Getting there

The easiest way to see Ablington Manor is on foot from Bibury. The Bibury and Ablington walk, 5 miles from Arlington Row, crosses the wold by Packhorse Lane and the Salt Way, comes down the lane into Ablington past the manor, and returns along the Coln valley to Arlington. By car, Ablington is reached by a lane from Bibury, but there is nowhere to park in the hamlet and little in Bibury, so walking is better. The 855 bus between Cirencester and Bourton-on-the-Water stops in Bibury, Monday to Saturday.

Nearby

Back in Bibury, Arlington Row and St Mary's Church, where ledger slabs of the eighteenth century to the Coxwell family of Bibury Court lie in the nave, are both a short walk from the river. The Swan Hotel by the bridge and Bibury Trout Farm, which has a café, are the places to eat. Downstream, St John the Baptist at Coln St Aldwyns is the next church on the river.