Athelhampton House

Athelhampton was built around 1485 by Sir William Martyn, a Dorset landowner and collector of the wine duty at Poole, who was granted licence to enclose 160 acres of deer park, wall his manor in stone and lime, and crenellate it with towers. The Great Hall he raised, with its timbered roof, survives substantially as built and is considered one of the finest examples of fifteenth-century domestic architecture in England. His descendant Robert Martyn added the West Wing and a gatehouse in the early sixteenth century, and the family, who remained Catholic through the Reformation, held the house until Sir Nicholas Martyn, the last of the male line, died in 1595.

The estate then passed through other hands and slowly declined over the following centuries. Thomas Hardy's father, a stonemason, worked on the house, and Hardy himself visited on several occasions. In 1891 Alfred Cart de Lafontaine bought Athelhampton and poured his fortune into restoring it to Tudor glory and laying out the formal gardens, until losses in the First World War forced him to sell in 1916. He died in 1944.

In 1957 Robert Victor Cooke, a retired Bristol surgeon, bought the house and filled it with his collection of antiques; his grandson Patrick Cooke, the third generation of the family here, inherited in 1992. In July 2019 the economist Giles Keating purchased Athelhampton, the Cooke contents were sold at auction that October, and the new owner reopened the house and gardens to the public.

Athelhampton was said to be haunted as far back as the 1850s, and its reports have the virtue of coming from people who lived and worked in the house. The Grey Lady was seen in the Tudor Room by a retired housemaid and again by the housekeeper of 1966; Robert Cooke, whose family owned Athelhampton from 1957 to 2019, said he had seen her passing through the bedroom walls in the early hours. Residents and visitors alike have described the scratching of the ape behind the library panelling, the tapping of Cooper in the wine cellar, and the black-robed priest hurrying along the corridors and vanishing at the turn.

In 2002 the newly launched Most Haunted chose Athelhampton for one of its very first televised investigations, and the Living TV crew's overnight vigil put the house firmly on the paranormal map. Since then the house has appeared on ghost-hunting podcasts and in most published lists of England's most haunted houses, and paranormal groups have held their own vigils in the cellar, the Great Chamber and the library. Eleven distinct presences have been recorded over the years, including a woman reading in the hall who watched two duellists fight their way across the Great Chamber.

The present owner has taken a relaxed and rather charming line, weaving the ghost stories into the house's evening tours rather than staging them as a scare attraction. Sceptics observe that an old house of timber, panelling and running water beside a river will tap and scratch of its own accord, and that the ape story is suspiciously neat, with accounts differing on whether the daughter died or simply walked away. Athelhampton's answer is that its ghosts have never frightened anyone very much, and that the housekeeper of 1966 knew what she saw.

Athelhampton House and Gardens is near Puddletown, five miles east of Dorchester in Dorset, just off the A35 with parking on site. Unusually for a private house it is open daily throughout the year, from mid-morning to late afternoon with last admission an hour before closing; check the house's website for current times, prices and seasonal changes. Complimentary guided tours of the house run during opening hours, taking in the Great Hall, the Tudor Room and the panelled rooms where the ghosts are reported. The upper rooms are reached by historic stairs, so check the house\'s accessibility information if you need step-free access.

The gardens are a draw in their own right: five acres of formal grounds including four walled gardens, the famous yew pyramids of the Great Court, long herbaceous borders, pools and fountains and an Edwardian kitchen garden. There is a restaurant serving breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea, open without paying admission. On selected evenings, particularly in the run-up to Christmas, the Estate Manager leads after-dark tours of Tudor history and ghostly tales, with mulled wine and mince pies served halfway round in the Great Hall.

You can stay on the estate. The Cochrane Wing is a private wing of the house itself, arranged over three floors with luxury en-suite bedrooms for up to fourteen, a modern kitchen and dining room, free entry to the house and gardens and the option of a private tour. River Cottage, a thatched cottage in the grounds with three en-suite bedrooms, sleeps six. Dorchester, Puddletown and the Piddle Valley villages offer inns and B&Bs nearby.