'One of the most intriguing and unspoilt estates in the Cotswolds' has come to the market at £26 million

The Cotswolds is easy on the eye, with its gently rolling landscape and homes of honey-coloured stone. There is, too, plenty to do in this neck of the woods, thanks to the bustling market towns with their alluring shops, plus, of course, nearby Cheltenham racecourse, which hosts 16 fixtures a year, including the famous Festival.

Amid all this charm, one of the grandest estates in the Cotswolds has come on to the open the market: the Asquith family’s secluded, 1,334-acre Hinchwick Manor estate at Condicote, Gloucestershire. Crispin Holborow of Savills Private Office is handling the sale, with an asking price of £26 million for the the whole.

The family are also happy to split the sale into lots, with the main Hinchwick Manor house plus 76 acres priced at £9 million.

‘It’s a real privilege to be involved in the sale. Hinchwick Manor estate is in the absolute sweet spot for anyone looking to live in the north Cotswolds,' says Holbrow.

'The manor, with its remarkable courtyard, offers exceptional versatility and the surrounding landscape, with its wonderful rolling hills and belts of mature woodland, provides a timeless backdrop in a prime location that has changed little over the centuries.’

Located some five miles equidistant from Moreton-in-Marsh and Stow-on-the-Wold, and 16-odd miles from Cheltenham (and in an area that has produced a few Festival winners), Hinchwick comes to the open market following the death in May 2024 of Stephen Asquith — a great-grandson of H. H. Asquith, the Liberal statesman and prime minister — who inherited the historic farming estate in the 1980s.

One of the most intriguing and unspoilt country estates in the Cotswolds, Hinchwick comprises the imposing Grade II-listed manor house, with its picturesque octagonal courtyard of traditional farm barns, set amid well-managed gardens, pasture and woodland, together with a portfolio of estate cottages and two independent farms. These are Hinchwick Hill, with 699 acres of arable, pasture, woodland and valleys with evident sporting potential, and Alders Farm, a 558-acre commercial operation with grain, livestock and storage facilities.

As mentioned earlier, this great estate is offered either as a whole, at a guide price of £26 million, or in four lots. The £9 million Lot 1 is the manor house with its courtyard, a delightful converted barn known as Scarlet Sub Edge and its surrounding fields, some 77 acres in all.

Living in such a grand place might seem a daunting prospect, but the reality is a little different: this is no dusty-museum of a property, but a very liveable home. Behind Hinchwick’s grand country-house exterior the main house offers more than 8,000sq ft of living space on three floors, much of which was reconfigured and adapted for easy family living over the years and now presents a blank canvas for a future custodian.

The drawing room and dining room, which flank the flag-stoned central hall, provide the main entertaining spaces and a network of smaller family and services rooms was rearranged in the early noughties to create a much larger kitchen and breakfast room.

The first floor houses the principal bedroom suite, two further en-suite bedrooms and a family sitting room, with seven bedrooms and two bathrooms on the second floor.

The octagon of buildings to the east of the house incorporates two sensitively converted barns — the aforementioned Scarlet Sub Edge to the south and a former threshing barn to the north.

Hinchwick's origins can be traced to a small sub-manor estate granted in the 12th century to Oxfordshire’s Bruern Abbey, which developed it as a productive farming unit until the Dissolution in 1536. Since then, the estate, situated in the remote upper Dikler valley to the north-west of Stow, has remained largely agricultural in character, with the focus on sheep and corn production from the 16th century onwards, before the introduction of mixed arable and livestock rearing in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In the late 18th century, Hinchwick was already a well-defined small farming estate, which was unaffected by the enclosure, in 1778, of the open fields of southern Condicote, when much of that land was divided among four major local estates. This happy state remained until, in 1826, John Dutton, 2nd Baron Sherborne, sold Hinchwick to Sir Charles Cockerell of the adjoining Sezincote estate, where Sir Charles’s elder brother, the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, designed the Grade I-listed Sezincote House in 1805, having previously designed nearby Daylesford in 1790.

In 1826, Pepys Cockerell’s architect son, Charles Robert Cockerell, designed the present Hinchwick Manor to replace an earlier manor farmhouse. Hinchwick remained part of the Sezincote estate until the 1920s, being acquired in 1927 by Roger Pilkington of the eponymous glass-making family, who, in 1937, significantly enlarged the house in the Cotswold manor-house style.

He also expanded the landholding to some 700 acres by integrating it with the nearby Manor Farm for sheep, corn, beef and dairy production. By the mid 20th century, however, the estate had shifted largely to grassland, although the Second World War brought increased arable cultivation before there was a reversion to pastoral use.

Stephen Asquith’s early experience of life at Hinchwick Manor was as a boy during the Second World War, when he and his mother went to live there with his mother’s great-aunt, Helen Pilkington. Later, after a spell in the merchant navy, he returned to live and farm on part of the estate, eventually moving to the manor with his family as its new owner in 1988.

Hinchwick Manor and the Hinchwick Estate are for sale through Savills — see more details.