Buckland House, Faringdon, Oxfordshire, England

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

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

In 1690 the Throckmortons, a wealthy recusant Warwickshire family, acquired the Buckland estate by marriage but altered it little until, in the mid 1750s, Sir Robert Throckmorton (1702-91), the fourth baronet, commissioned the elder and younger John Woods (of Bath) to design and build a house on a new site some way from the old manor house. Throckmorton also commissioned the landscape designer Richard Woods (?1716-93) to lay out the park and pleasure grounds for him, around 1758-9. Further landscaping and planting seems to have occurred during the 1790s and early 19th century, supervised by Sir John Courtenay Throckmorton who had inherited the estate in 1791, this work possibly linked to the 1803 Enclosure Award. In 1908 Sir Maurice Fitzgerald bought the estate, employing W H Romaine Walker (1854-1940) to extend the house at the same time as the formal terrace was constructed against the north front, and Lady Fitzgerald supervised the construction of a water garden with rock paths on the north side of the lake. Following the Second World War the house entered institutional use, but returned to private ownership in the early 1990s.