Things to do in West Northamptonshire

Canons Ashby in Northamptonshire is one of the most unspoiled and most atmospheric of the National Trust's smaller country houses, a manor house whose origins lie in the priory established on this site in the twelfth century and whose subsequent development through the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods has produced one of the most interesting and most personally characterful interiors of any house of its scale in England. The house has been home to the Dryden family since the sixteenth century and its relative isolation from the main currents of later fashion has preserved its earlier interiors in unusual completeness. The house retains its Elizabethan great hall and the Jacobean painted parlour with wall paintings of the early seventeenth century in a state of remarkable preservation. The Dryden family's relative obscurity after the seventeenth century, when their great connection was the poet John Dryden, meant that the house was not subjected to the extensive Georgian and Victorian remodelling that removed the earlier character from most comparable houses, and the result is a sequence of rooms whose decoration reflects the taste and ambitions of successive generations of a single family across several centuries. The priory church adjacent to the house contains monuments to the Dryden family across multiple generations and retains the nave of the original Augustinian priory church in its current fabric, providing a direct connection to the medieval religious house that preceded the manor. The formal garden, restored by the National Trust to its seventeenth-century design, provides an excellent complement to the house interior.