Tixall Gatehouse was built in about 1580 by Sir Walter Aston to stand in front of an older house. This house and a successor, built in 1780, have disappeared, and the gatehouse today is surrounded by grass. It was described in 1598 as ‘one of the fairest pieces of work made of late times in all these counties’ and, more recently, as ‘an Elizabethan ruin, without roof, floors or windows, used as a shelter for cattle’.

Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned at Tixall for two weeks in 1586. Her son James I came here once for two days. In 1678 the Aston of the day was sent briefly to the Tower, accused of a part in the Titus Oates conspiracy. A century later, his descendant Thomas Clifford, guided by ‘the celebrated Brown’ and his pupil Eames, ingeniously made use of a new canal to form a lake in his park – known to boaters as Tixall Wide.

We bought the gatehouse for £300 in 1968. On its first floor we made five large rooms, one of them a gallery with an oriel window at each end above the two archways. In the spandrels of these archways are, facing the outside world, armed warriors; and on the inside, voluptuous ladies thinly disguised as angels.

The roof is paved with stone, and to be high up here among the balustrades and turret tops, with Arcadian landscape on every side, is an important Landmark Trust experience. The gatehouse clock lives in one of the turrets (as do two bracing cabinlike bedrooms and the bathrooms); this strikes the hour, and perhaps the half hour, but has no hands or face to show the actual time, which seems unimportant here, even vulgar.

View our history sheet for this Landmark

Sleeps: 4+2