Hidden Gem in 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.

Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire is one of the finest and most romantically beautiful ruined Elizabethan mansions in England, a great house of the 1570s built for Humphrey Stafford and subsequently associated with Sir Christopher Hatton, Elizabeth I's Lord Chancellor, whose combination of the extraordinary Elizabethan and early Stuart facade stonework, the partially restored formal garden and the picturesque quality of the well-maintained ruin creates one of the most atmospherically rewarding English heritage sites managed by English Heritage. The house is notable for the exceptional quality of its decorative stonework and the ambitious scale of its conception. The architectural ambition of Kirby Hall was considerable from the outset, the great hall porch and the entrance court facades demonstrating a sophisticated engagement with the classical architectural vocabulary that reflects the influence of Italian and Flemish pattern books on the Elizabethan building tradition. The carved stone decoration, particularly the giant pilasters of the inner court applied to the façade in a way that reflects the contemporary French influence of Philibert de l'Orme, is among the finest examples of Elizabethan architectural ornament in England. The formal gardens, partially restored by English Heritage in the 1990s, provide the most complete recreation of a seventeenth-century English formal garden available at any ruined house, the recreated box parterres and the stone garden structures providing context for the ruined house they surround.

Lyveden New Bield in Northamptonshire is one of the most mysterious and most poignant heritage properties managed by the National Trust, an unfinished Elizabethan lodge begun by Sir Thomas Tresham in 1595 as a statement of his Catholic faith and never completed because of his death in 1605. The shell of the extraordinary building carries a programme of carved stonework celebrating the Passion of Christ, and the moated garden attached is the finest example of an unrestored Elizabethan garden layout in England. The unfinished state of the building, its windows without glazing and interior never fitted out, combined with the silence and remoteness of the Northamptonshire countryside, creates an atmosphere of melancholy abandonment quite unlike any other National Trust property. The garden earthworks around the lodge are the most completely preserved Elizabethan garden earthworks in England, the terracing, mounds, moat and water channels all surviving in their original form. The National Trust's decision to manage the garden without restoration makes Lyveden the best surviving evidence for the form and character of Elizabethan garden design in England.

The Triangular Lodge at Rushton in Northamptonshire is the most extraordinary piece of architectural symbolism in England, a late Elizabethan building of 1593 created entirely around the theme of the Trinity in a symbolic statement of Catholic faith by Sir Thomas Tresham, a recusant Catholic who spent large parts of his later life imprisoned for refusing to renounce his faith. Every element of the building, from its three walls, three storeys and three windows per side to the three-sided chimney stacks and the Latin inscriptions referring to the Trinity, embodies the number three in an act of architectural devotion of remarkable intensity. Tresham built the lodge in the grounds of his manor house at Rushton as a warrener's lodge, its practical function providing cover for what was primarily a symbolic building. The exterior stonework is covered in emblems, quotations and references whose full interpretation occupied Tresham scholars for generations and whose religious significance was unmistakable to contemporaries who knew the context of Catholic recusancy in late Elizabethan England. The building is managed by English Heritage and the interior, while modest, continues the tripartite symbolism established on the exterior. The condition of the stonework and the survival of the inscriptions in considerable completeness make the lodge one of the finest examples of Elizabethan architectural symbolism surviving in England. The context of the Tresham family's Catholic recusancy connects the lodge to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Sir Thomas's son Francis was one of the conspirators, giving this small garden building a historical resonance quite out of proportion to its size.