Owlpen Manor

Owlpen Parish

The Owlpen parish has a recorded history of 900 years. The adult population of about 35 on the electoral roll, perhaps a tenth of its peak at the turn of the nineteenth century, is the smallest in Gloucestershire.

Topographical writers have commented on the picturesque combe, or 'bottom', as the local word has it, which encloses the historic hamlet around the manor hourse. It is set under the limestone Edge in a mystery land of deeply wooded valleys between the 'high, wild hills' of the Cotswold uplands and the gentler Vale of Berkeley.

owlpen manor

The Owlpen valley in autumn, looking west

John Smyth writes (in 1639):

"Owlpen, the situation giving the denomination ... quasi hole-pen, being in as deep a bottom or hole as is elsewhere to be seen. It may perhaps like some to derive the Etimology from Owlepen, quasi a pen or Cage for owles; sith noe forest made up of Ivy bushes can exceed the fitness for the breed and harbour of owles."

Samuel Rudder of Uley (1779) describes the valley as "a kind of gloomy retreat":

"The church and houses lie dispersedly at the top of a deep and narrow combe, almost environed by steep hills, covered with hanging beech woods, and forming a kind of amphitheatre, except to the west."

T.D. Fosbrooke (1807) finds Owlpen

"a singularly romantic and sequestered spot which it owes to a half dilapidated Court House overrun with ivy, a rude church, no buildings, but now and then a simple cottage of thatch, deep dells, amphitheatres of steep acclivities, clothed with fine wood, and interjacent knolls of heath, producing a paucity of enclosure, the ruin of the picturesque."

misty spring

The manor house in early spring

The farm and woodlands

The Owlpen Estate is run largely for amenity and conservation: organic farming methods are employed on the Jurassic limestone grassland. The valley has been farmed since time immemorial. Traces of strip lynchets dating from medieval times surround the valley slopes and the boundaries of the feudal "open fields" can still be seen on the Down at the head of the valley. Today the permanent pasture is designated an Environmentally Sensitive Area.

Livestock farming and forestry enterprises are administered from the manor, with beef from the Owlpen herd produced for sale from the Estate Office. For a long time there were Gloucester cattle and Cotswold sheep. The woods supply plenty of venison and pheasant in season.

The woodland consists of traditional stands of Cotswold edge beech and ash managed for sustainable production. They are designated 'ancient semi-natural woodland', fringing the steep slopes of the escarpment, whose boundaries are much the same today as on the earliest eighteenth-century records. There are some impressive oaks, and prolific wildflowers and butterflies associated with the unimproved, species-rich meadowland.

Firewood is sold around the local villages and towns, keeping the hearths blazing of a hard core of customers who have been loyal over many years. Please contact the Estate Office to order firewood.

Wildlife abounds: badgers, roe deer, and foxes; there are buzzards and sparrow hawks, visiting herons, ravens, kingfishers and, of course, the fabled owls of Owlpen.

The Cottages

There is a number of landmark cottages on the estate, from the dependencies and farmhouses of the feudal estate to the listed buildings around the manor house.

Old weavers', keepers' and gardeners' cottages have been restored since 1974 and furnished with antiques and four-poster beds as holiday cottages, run in the style of a country house hotel. The holiday cottages are let to an international clientele, returning to Owlpen year by year from Alaska to Tasmania.

The cottages have been described by The Sunday Times as constituting "a Gloucestershire Shangri-la" and by The Guardian as "some of the best available in Britain today".

court house

The Court House, a Stuart garden building of 1620

Walks

There are about five miles of footpaths on the estate, with beautiful and varied walks through the beech woods, thick with bluebells and wild garlic in the spring, along the meadows of the Ewelme valley and the Cotswold edge. They interconnect with a system of public footpaths, including the Cotswold Way long-distance path, extending through infinite miles of spectacular countryside.

Visitors to the manor are welcome to enjoy popular walks through the woods behind the manor to Nympsfield and the Uley Bury hill fort, across the fields to the Strawberry Hill Gothick fantasy at Stouts Hill, or along the carriage drive to Owlpen House. A woodland trail has been waymarked.

You will find that some of these local walks feature in the best-selling national guides to walks in the British Isles. Maps and walking guides are for sale in the Estate Office.

Owlpen House

Ruins of Owlpen House still stand on the top of the scarp, near the eastern boundary of the estate, by the Nympsfield drive which leads to the Wotton-under-Edge to Nailsworth road. The House only lasted just over 100 years, until it was demolished in 1957. The trappings of a Victorian mansion remain: two lodges, the stable block, ruined glass-houses and walled gardens, a rare country house gas works with retort house, and a lily pond and cellars. Victorian plantings, shelter belts, shrubberies and clumps, are now past their maturity.

The Ewelme brook rises at Twopence (or "Tetpens") Spring at the head of the valley, below a bronze age round barrow, all but ploughed out today. A standing stone stood in the field by Marlings End Cottage.

Owlpen is now something of a 'deserted village', nettles and elders marking the sites of many old cottages and gardens, along Fiery Lane and the margins of the woods.

owlpen house

Owlpen House, demolished in 1957

church vine detail

Mosaics in the church of 1887

Owlpen Church

The Church of the Holy Cross (Church of England) is still in use, with services regularly on alternate Sundays.

The parish registers date to 1686, for those with an interest in the genealogy of local families, and the archives of the manor date over 800 years.

The churchyard contains some fine table tombs and monuments to families who emigrated from Owlpen all over the English-speaking world from the 1830s. Now they return every year to discover their roots.

owlpen farm

Two of the outlying farms at Owlpen, early spring

balooning at owlpen

Ballooning at Owlpen in July

uley bury

Uley Bury, the iron age hill fort that shelters the Owlpen valley from the west wind

wedding

Wedding at Owlpen in April