You might recognise Chavenage House, in the heart of the south Cotswolds near Tetbury, from the small screen: it was one of the main filming locations for Poldark, and is now playing a leading role in the Disney+ adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper's Rivals.
If you're a long-standing Country Life reader, however, it's probably been on your radar a lot longer than that. This fascinating home has been featured several times in the magazine, so as it appears on our screens once again we wanted to bring you one of those articles in its entirety.
The following is the piece written by architectural historian Nicholas Cooper for Country Life in 2003, together with pictures by Paul Barker from that same year — and a few from its first ever appearance in the magazine, back in 1911.
Fig 1: The east entrance front of Chavenage House in the Cotswolds as it appeared in Country Life in 2003.
Chavenage House, two miles north-west of Tetbury, is both beautiful and puzzling. It is easy to like, and difficult to understand. Strange stories exist about things that did not happen, and a great deal of mystery about equally curious things that did. But the stories that collect round old houses sometimes seem as much a part of their history as such tangible things as the architecture and furnishings, and where so little is known, speculation is justified — indeed, inevitable.
The best-known tale is how Nathaniel Stephens — a leading Parliamentarian in the Civil War and a member of the Long Parliament — was keeping Christmas at Chavenage in 1648 when Henry Ireton arrived, hot foot from London, to urge Stephens to return with him to vote for the King's execution. They argued far into the night, and although warned by his sister of terrible things that would befall the family, in the end Stephens rode off with Ireton in the morning.
The following May, he is said to have sickened of an incurable illness; at his funeral a ghostly carriage appeared with a headless driver, and the guests watched in horror as the spectre of the dead man climbed into it and was borne away.
The story was either invented or elaborated in 1845 by a local clergyman who published it in a long poem. But the writer's respect for the truth may be guessed by his changing Nathaniel's name to Richard ('his father's appellation, and more suited to versification') and his sister's from Abigail to Rachel.
The facts are that Nathaniel did not die until 1660, declared himself fit and well when he made his will in 1658, never voted for the King's execution and spoke out against it. So it may not be true that he was whisked away by a headless coachman either, but it is a good tale.
Chavenage House's golden stone — as with so many buildings in the Cotswolds — changes with the light.
The Stephens family's principal seat was at Eastington, near Stroud — a large, formal, Jacobean house, now vanished — and it seems likely that in the 17th century Chavenage was used as a dower house or by eldest sons before they inherited. It was described as 'that great farm house' in 1654, when Nathaniel Stephens settled it on his son Richard's new bride as her jointure, and when Richard died his will specified that his widow could continue to live at Eastington if she wished. It was only in the following century that the family made Chavenage (Fig 1) their regular home, and it is not clear why they left the grander house to decay and chose to live in the smaller one, unless it was simply for economy.
The gardens at Chavenage are just as enigmatic and beautiful as the house.
From 1732 to 1795, Chavenage House belonged to a succession of childless brothers, the last of whom, Henry Stephens, bequeathed it to a cousin, Henry Willis, on condition that he took the Stephens surname. But Henry Willis Stephens, who occupied the house from then until 1814, was convinced that his relations were trying to poison him. Disappearing from home without any farewells but having made over his estate to trustees, he reached Le Havre, where the British consul was alarmed both for his state of mind and — since Willis Stephens having taken £4,000 with him in bank notes — for his personal safety.
Fig 2: The hall. The chimneypiece, of about 1605, may originally have come from the Stephens family's principal house, Eastington. Picture from Country Life in 2003.
Thence he made his way via Lisbon to the Canary Islands, where he hoped that in a remote Dominican convent he would be safe. But even there he felt threatened; back in London by 1816, he wrote that 'even the Deserts of Teneriffe could not protect me from my Enemies, who invisibly pursue me — so unjustly — for Reasons entirely unknown to me.' He died, in 1821, in Paris.
By the terms of his will, the house passed to a niece, who married Maurice Fitzgerald Townshend, Rector of Thornbury. He changed his name to Townshend-Stephens. Unexpectedly inheriting the Townshends' Irish estates in 1845, their son preferred Ireland, and for most of the 19th century, Chavenage was let. The contents, which Henry Willis Stephens had intended to be retained as heirlooms, were dispersed in a sale; the house was sold in 1891 to George Hoole-Lowsley-Williams, whose mother had inherited land in Gloucestershire but lacked a house to go with it. David Lowsley-Williams, the house's present owner, is his grandson, and it is hard to believe that his family has not been here since the 16th century. [Editor's note, May 2026: David Lowsley-Williams died peacefully at Chavenage in 2023; his family still owns the property today.]
Fig 3: The entrance to the ballroom. The room is part of an impressive range built in 1904 on the west of the house in a pared-down Arts-and-Crafts style by the architect J. T. Micklethwaite.
At first glance, Chavenage is the perfect picture of the Cotswold manor house, with its two-storeyed porch set between a pair of wings, the great hall clearly marked by its tall window, and the whole built of warm, golden-grey stone. But when one looks more closely, many of the details seem rather odd. The front door has a date of 1576 and a contemporary frieze, but over it is a window of the early 15th century and a fragment of a later tombstone. Elsewhere, there are some most curious windows, Gothic revival and re-invented Tudor.
The hall (Fig 2) has a splendid fireplace with Stephens arms on the over-mantel, screen and gallery with an 18th-century chamber organ, a flat ceiling, and an impressive doorway leading to the Oak Room beyond. But all is not what it seems. On close inspection, the screen is an opened-up partition, ornamented with decorative details from a wide variety of sources. The doorway opposite is also made up of a variety of elements, some of them probably Continental. The flat ceiling is not the original one, the stud-work of a shallow, plaster barrel vault remains over the gallery, and this may have extended over the entire hall. The chimneypiece is from about 1605, and was produced by the same local workshop as ones at Lasborough and at Bradford-on-Avon, but it is tempting to wonder whether it might have come from Eastington. However, it may always have been here.
Fig 4: The library. The room is in the south-east wing, on the ground floor.
Beyond that lies the grandest room in the house, the Oak Room (Fig 5), which has early-17th-century wainscot of high quality and a remarkable fireplace of the mid 16th, wholly Gothic save for two Renaissance brackets. Portrait roundels above it are typical of those imported from the Low Countries, and a sideboard recess is backed with grotesque Jacobean figures and a re-set panel with the date of 1627.
The whole ensemble has in fact been pieced together at an unknown date, and it is doubtful whether either the woodwork or the fireplace were in the house originally, but as in the hall the whole creates the most agreeable air of warmth and comfort. Again, one can only speculate about origins. Some of the panelling may be from Eastington, and since the Bristol area possesses some of the earliest surviving Renaissance work in the country, the fireplace probably comes from another local source.
Fig 5: The Oak (or Panelled) Room. The grandest room in the house, it has early-17th-century panelling and a mid-16th-century chimney-piece. The portrait roundels above the fireplace are Flemish in style.
The south-east wing contains the library (Fig 4) on the ground floor, an addition of unknown date and with a pretty Rococo fireplace at the north end. A wing to the south contains the billiard room, with an 18th-century coved ceiling and another fireplace of the same type as the one in the hall; thickly painted, its date is difficult to establish, but it is likely to be a genuine piece, removed from elsewhere. Two windows light the billiard room, one an imported window of the early 15th century and the other a Gothic-style bay of about 1800.
An 18th-century stair leads to two bedrooms above the library, close hung with tapestry. One, known as Cromwell's room (Fig 9), has a Georgian chimneypiece, the other, Ireton's Room, a Victorian one. Throughout the house, windows are glazed with a fine array of panels and fragments, English and Continental, of the 14th to 18th centuries.
These rooms, with their odd windows, look out to the south. To the west is a rather impressive range built in a pared-down Arts-and-Crafts manner in 1904 by J. T. Micklethwaite to provide a ballroom and services. Also to the west is a private chapel with a tower. The chapel has unusual architectural details, and windows and niches filled with a variety of figure carvings of the 14th to 17th centuries, probably thrown out during 19th-century church restorations. Within the chapel is a Norman font found on the estate, and two figures from a 17th-century church monument.
Fig 6: Ireton's Room. The bedroom is so called because it is said that in 1648 Cromwell and General Ireton visited Chavenage in order to persuade the moderate Colonel Nathaniel Stephens to support the Bill of Impeachment against Charles I. The Flemish tapestries are of about 1640.
Even when one has disentangled which parts of the house were built by the first Stephenses and which by the last, there is still a difficulty in deciding when the Gothic Revival works were carried out and when the fascinating collections of woodwork, glass and stone carvings were installed. There is no direct documentation for any of it, although early engravings offer some help. The odd windows in the main front are already shown in a print titled Chavenage, the Seat of Henry Stephens, which could mean Henry Willis Stephens or his predecessor. The chapel tower was standing by 1803, and the strange windows on the east front (even stranger than they are today) are shown in an aquatint of 1817 which shows the tower already well clothed in creepers.
An inventory of the house's contents, also made in 1817, mentions the organ gallery, so the made-up screen must have existed by then. In the grounds are the remains of a Gothic-Revival grotto, much more likely to be 18th century than 19th.
Fig 7: The chapel tower next to the house, as it appeared in Country Life in 1911.
Some, at least, of the interior woodwork and the stained glass may have been installed in the next generation by Maurice Townshend-Stephens. In 1817, three tapestry bedrooms are mentioned; there are only two now. Some years ago, a blocked doorway behind some of the extant tapestry was found to be papered over with a newspaper of 1840. The genuine medieval windows in the porch and the billiard room and the many fragments of stone carving are more likely to have been introduced in the 19th century than earlier.
The 1845 poem that retold the story about Nathaniel Stephens's ghost must have been written and published with Maurice Townshend-Stephens's active encouragement, although he seems to have lived mainly at Thornbury. All these complexities suggest that there have been at least two periods of antiquarianism at Chavenage, not just one, and what one knows of Henry Willis Stephens's dissociation from reality suggests strongly that much of it must have been his. What one can safely say is that this antiquarian work adds much to the enjoyment of the Tudor house. Much of its idiosyncrasy (and incidentally the difficulty of dating it) may be due to its having been done by the house's owners themselves, without an architect.
Fig 8: Inside the chapel. The Norman font was found on the estate.
But the question of who did what is still further complicated by the fact that much of the glass in the windows of the house was said in 1899 to have been found in boxes by a recent tenant, who apparently also found further tapestry folded away—perhaps from the third tapestry bedroom. The most extraordinary of all the finds in the house was one which raises even more questions about its 19th-century history. This was a series of drawings found in 1969 for the decoration of the state rooms at Windsor Castle, built by Sir Jeffrey Wyatville between 1826 and 1828. These are initialled by the King, and must at some stage have been in the hands of the decorators Morel and Seddon.
Fig 9: Cromwell's Room. The tapestry, from Mortlake, is one of a complete series, and dates from 1640.
It is hard to imagine how they could have reached Chavenage, although it does suggest that someone with an interest in interior decoration was in the house in the 1830s or 1840s. Who this was, and what they may have done, are among Chavenage's many mysteries. However that may be, when these drawings were sold at Sotheby's in 1971 they were bought for the royal archives, and with the money raised Mr and Mrs Lowsley-Williams were able, with the help of the Historic Buildings Council, to repair the roof of the house.
Whatever problems past generations have left to solve, they also left the means of keeping Chavenage standing: a friendly and hospitable house where a ghost seems most unlikely. Perhaps it really was carried off by a headless coachman.
Chavenage House in Chavenage, Tetbury, is open to visitors, as well as film crews — see their website for more details.