Athelhampton House

Athelhampton Hall is a picturesque Tudor manor house near Dorchester in Dorset. Two ranges of the Tudor house remain, with an impressive Great Hall, described by Country Life as “one of the finest examples of 15^th-century domestic architecture in England”. The remainder of the house was rebuilt in two phases, in the 1890s and the 1920s.

Sir William Martyn inherited the manor of Athelhampton in 1485 and commissioned a new building, probably on the site of an earlier medieval house, shortly afterwards. In 1495 he was granted a licence to crenellate Athelhampton, a sign of status by this stage, rather than necessity, and given permission to enclose 160 acres for a deer park. A new range, set at a right angle to the existing range, was built for Robert Martyn and his wife, Elizabeth Kelway, in the 1530s. It was previously thought this second range was built in the Elizabethan era, but recent archival research places the building works prior to 1540.

The Great Hall has a striking original timber roof, Tudor fireplace and minstrels’ gallery. There is fifteenth-century stained-glass, with some Victorian additions, displaying coats of arms of the Martyn family and their wives, in the windows in the upper parts of the hall. The linen-fold panelling was added in the nineteenth century.

A two-storey high bay window links the high end of the Great Hall to the Great Chamber in the second Tudor range. Its stained-glass windows show the marriage alliances of the Martyn family with their coats of arms and those of their wives’ families.

The Great Chamber has a large Tudor fireplace with an Armada fireback and more original stained glass with family heraldry, including the coat of arms of Sir John Tregonwell, the second husband Elizabeth Martyn, widow of Robert.

The King’s room, originally the fifteenth century solar, has a seventeenth-century oak tester bed and a late Elizabethan Armada chest. The Marriage Chamber, set above the service end of the Great Hall, has a large fireplace with an impressive frieze which includes two apes, representing the Martyn family, and three unicorns, the emblem of the family of Isobel Farringdon, first wife of Sir William.

The Elizabethan kitchen, recently restored, is used for Tudor re-enactment events.

The Martyns were a Catholic family who kept a low profile during Elizabeth I’s reign, although in 1586 Chidiock Tichborne, married to Jane Martyn, one of the daughters of the house, was arrested and executed for his role in the Babington Plot. Of Sir Nicholas Martyn’s ten children, only four daughters survived childhood and, on his death in 1595, the house was split equally between them. The house remained in shared ownership for several hundred years, with a period of occupation by tenant farmers, until 1848 when it was purchased by George Wood, who reunited it back into one ownership.

In the mid twentieth-century, Athelhampton was bought by Sir Robert Cooke, and three generations of the Cooke family lived at the property, restoring the house and gardens, until 2019 when it was sold to Giles Keating. Since purchasing the property, Giles has discovered the Elizabethan kitchen, hidden under 1970s cabinets and decoration, and restored it to its original form. He has also installed the renewable energy infrastructure (solar arrange, Tesla batteries and heat pumps) that underpins a commitment to make Athelhampton’s energy use carbon neutral, the first project of its kind for this type of heritage property.

Read our article, In Conversation with Giles Keating, in Issue 11