Ditchley, Charlbury, England

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest.

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

In 1583 Sir Henry Lee of Quarrendon, near Aylesbury, Ranger of Woodstock Park, bought a house and land at Ditchley. In 1603 he acquired a license to enclose a substantial deer park and in 1608 and 1610 James I hunted at Ditchley. In 1722 James Gibbs began a new house for Lee's descendant, the second Earl of Litchfield, probably siting it away from the old, timber-framed house (which may have stood 300-400 metres east of the new house). Gibbs also constructed a long terrace ranged against the garden (north) front of the House, with avenues radiating from the entrance front in goose-foot form. This terrace, which incorporates the Saxon earthwork Grim's Ditch, is shown in a plan of 1726 (Garden History 1982). It is said that on a clear day Blenheim Palace to the south and Heythrop to the north could be seen along the vast avenue vistas between these estates (Batey in Raphael et al 1982). In the mid 1740s the old fishpond was converted into an ornamental lake, perhaps with a Chinese bridge and grotto head. The terrace was probably removed during landscaping works of the 1760s when the landscape around the House was largely naturalised and Stiff Leadbetter designed the Rotunda temple. The pleasure grounds seems to have been enclosed around 1805-10 by the twelfth Viscount Dillon (died 1813), and laid out by John Claudius Loudon. The seventeenth Viscount died in 1932, and in 1933 Ronald and Nancy Tree bought the House and park, employing the young Geoffrey Jellicoe from 1933 to 1938 to design an Italianate formal garden and reinstate Gibbs' terrace. Sir Winston Churchill, a friend of the Trees, spent weekends at Ditchley during the early 1940s, when the moon was up and it was feared that he would not be safe at Chequers (see description of this site elsewhere in the Register). The Trees sold Ditchley in 1949; in 1953 it was bought by Sir David Wills, who gave the House, gardens and part of the park to the Ditchley Foundation, for use as a conference centre to promote Anglo-American relations, in which use it remains (1998).