In 1613, the newly enriched Sir Baptist Hicks began work on a new house in Chipping Campden in the very latest style, looking out over equally fashionable formal gardens. Thirty years later, his mansion was burnt to the ground by retreating Royalist soldiers and only a single fragment remains. Other lesser buildings on the site survived. Two little pepperpot lodges frame the gateway beside Campden’s church, and two exceptional Jacobean banqueting houses with exuberant strapwork parapets and barley sugar twist chimneys face each other across a former terrace. The skeleton of the Jacobean gardens are still visible beneath the Cotswold turf. There is also a fine little building of uncertain original purpose, know as The Almonry. Today, the banqueting houses provide the main accommodation for two Landmarks, the Almonry acting as an annexe for one. To get to either Landmark, you leave your car in the former henyard at the edge of the site and walk across the site along a short grassy path.

In the seventeenth century, Sir Baptist’s guests would have retired to these houses for their ‘banquet’ (or dessert course) at the end of the meal, to drink rare wines, eat dried fruit and sweetmeats and admire his domain. Whether you choose to sip Tokay and nibble on a crystallised petal, or tuck into fish and chips with a glass of beer, in this place it cannot fail to be a banquet.

Deceptively diminutive from the terrace, this banqueting house has two further floors below, hidden by the lie of the land, once holding a self-contained apartment and executed with crisp Jacobean élan. It overlooks the Coneygree, an ancient ground now owned by the National Trust and no doubt the scene of many a hare course for the entertainment of Sir Baptist’s guests after dinner. More recently, in the nineteenth century, the Earl of Gainsborough used the loggia to review his militia as they ran through their drill on the Coneygree. A further twin bedroom and bathroom are provided in one of the pepperpot lodges – this time as diminutive as it looks.

View our history sheet for this Landmark.

Sleeps: 4+2