A picture-perfect Cotswolds manor house with magical gardens and an ancient orchard

(Image credit: Savills)

published 22 May 2025

If the Chelsea Flower Show has got you thinking about a house with a spectacular garden, The Manor House, Blockley, There are lawns, terraces, formal gardens and more, plus an ancient orchard with medlar, walnut, fig, quince, mulberry and various traditional pears — ideal for making up an unusual fruit salad.

The main house will also surely grow on you. Grade II*-listed and remodelled in the 18th century, the house, with its gabled projections, sash and mullioned windows and Tudor arched doorway, sits on the site of the medieval summer palace of the Bishops of Worcester (before 1539).

Inside, five reception rooms include an orangery and 10 bedrooms — three with superb suites.

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For as lovely as the interiors are, the ‘very special’ gardens of almost an acre have been the particular project of the vendor, with an ornamental fish pond, rose garden fringed with lavender, potager and white gardens and a substantial pergola (with wonderful view) among the joys on show.

If you want even more outdoor space, the further Lower Garden of a little under an acre is for sale separately, for an additional £250,000. It's here that you'll find the aforementioned orchard, with a brook meandering through.

The Lower Garden is connected, but has a separate entrance, and would make a lovely place to build a new house — subject to the usual consents, of course. Within the Cotswold National Landscape between Chipping Campden and Moreton-in-Marsh, ‘you are in the middle of a buzzing village, but you wouldn’t know it,’ says agent David Henderson.

The Manor House in Blockley is for sale at £3.5 million via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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