Ashby St Ledgers, Daventry, England

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

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

In the late Middle Ages the manor of Ashby St Ledgers was owned by the Catesbys. After the Reformation they adhered to the Old Faith; Edmund Campion (died 1581) was sheltered here, and in 1605 the Gunpowder Plot conspirators had their first meeting at Ashby, then home to Robert Catesby. He died in a shoot-out after the failure of the conspiracy, and the manor was subsequently acquired by Sir William Irwing, who in 1612 sold it to a London draper, Bryan Ianson. It was his son, John, who built the main house in 1652. In 1703 Ashby was sold to another draper, Joseph Ashley. Exactly 200 years later, in 1903, the estate was sold to the Hon Ivor Guest, third baronet and MP, who in 1918 became the first Viscount Wimborne. A steel fortune, a directorship of Barclay's Bank, and eventually the income of the 83,000 acre (roughly 34,500 hectare) Wimborne estate enabled him, from 1904 onwards, to employ Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) in a series of commissions to remodel and enlarge the house and to lay out new gardens. In 1934 Lady Wimborne became patron to the composer William Walton (died 1983), and several of his best-known works were composed at Ashby over the following few years. The work commissioned from Lutyens on the house and its gardens was but a part of a wider scheme to build a model village at Ashby with a community of craftsmen, which Guest envisaged would include trades such as 'Tapestry, wrot [sic] iron, Barge building, boots, tapestries, linen, fabrics, clocks, etc etc. Great fun!' (Aslet 1982, 158). Although this was ultimately unrealised, several buildings in the village were constructed to Lutyens' designs. His last work at Ashby was a churchyard tomb (listed grade II) for Lord Wimborne, who died in 1939. A cloister (listed grade II) was left unfinished. The second Lord Wimborne sold the estate in 1976 to a pension fund and there was a possibility that the house was to be converted to commercial use. By 1998 however it had returned to private ownership and occupation.