MANOR WHERE THE MITFORDS PLAYED

There has been a manor house at Asthall, near Burford, for many centuries, and the house we see today dates back mostly to the early 17th century.

Asthall’s current owner, Rosie Pearson, has restored it as a family home with new gardens, yew tunnels, sloping parterres and wildflower meadows. But Asthall’s main claim to fame is as the childhood home of the famously eccentric Mitford sisters. Their father, Lord Redesdale, known to his children as ‘Farve’, bought Asthall and its land in 1919. The house itself is the model for the fictional Alconleigh in Nancy Mitford’s novels The Pursuit Of Love (1945) and Love In A Cold Climate (1949).

The youngest sister Deborah, the late Duchess of Devonshire, recalled in 2009, ‘Asthall is the archetypal ancient Cotswold manor house, hard by the church, the garden descending to the river Windrush with the prettiest village imaginable and farms to match.’

The Mitfords remodelled the main house and converted a barn into a music room and library. This had a vast mullioned bay window and barrel-vaulted ceiling with plasterwork in the Arts and Crafts style. Diana Mitford recalled, ‘This large room, furnished with hundreds of old books, a grand piano and sofas, with high windows looking south and east, was all the world to my brother Tom and me at Asthall.’

The Mitford children all loved the house and were sad to leave. Jessica Mitford, in her memoir Hons And Rebels (1960), recalled the ‘enchanting promise of complete privacy from the grownups’. But restless Lord Redesdale moved the family to a new home that he had built for them, Swinbrook House, in 1926. Asthall was then bought by Thomas Hardcastle and was owned by his son, Anthony, until he died in 1997.

That same year, it was bought by Rosie Pearson, who says, ‘I drove down to see it and was just carried away.’ A daughter of the 3rd Viscount Cowdray, Ms Pearson grew up at vast Cowdray Park in West Sussex, and wanted a house with room for family life, yet also with a certain intimacy. She has kept alive that atmosphere of an old house connected with its landscape, and in the summer the semi-wild planting seems to reach into the house – something that the young Mitfords would almost certainly have relished.

Top: The house in its gardens. L-r: The oak-panelled living hall, and Jessica Mitford, aged six, being read to by her nine-year-old sister Unity