Guy's Cliffe House

After the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, the chantry site passed into private hands. The house that stands ruined today dates from 1751 and was begun by Samuel Greatheed, a West India slave-owner and merchant who served as Member of Parliament for Coventry from 1747 to 1761. His son Bertie Greatheed inherited the estate following the death of his mother in 1774, and in 1810 further improved house and grounds to heighten the picturesque qualities of the site. The estate took in a mill, stables, kitchen garden and land as far as Blacklow Hill to the north-west — the site of an ancient settlement, and the place where Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall, was murdered. In 1821 Bertie Greatheed erected a stone cross to mark the execution, known as Gaveston's Cross, and later noted in his diary that he could read its inscription from the house through his telescope.

The twentieth century brought other uses. The house served as a hospital during the First World War, and in the Second World War became a school for evacuated children. The estate was broken up and sold in 1947. In 1952 the mill became a pub and restaurant, The Saxon Mill; the stables became a riding school and the kitchen garden a nursery, and all three survive today. A toll house that stood by the road north of the mill was demolished in the mid twentieth century.

A new owner hoped to convert the house into a hotel, but the plans came to nothing and the building fell into disrepair. In 1955 it was bought by Aldwyn Porter and the chapel leased to the Freemasons, beginning a connection with the Masons that continues to this day. The roof had fallen in by 1966. In 1992, during the filming of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (The Last Vampyre), a fire scene got out of control and seriously damaged the building. Guy's Cliffe became a parish in 1858 and was for a time the least populous third-tier local authority in England — just two people at the 1961 count — before merging with Leek Wootton in 1986.

The ruined house is grade II listed and on the Heritage at Risk Register owing to significant problems, so it is not a building to wander into casually — and much of the site remains in private and Masonic use, the chapel still serving for Masonic ceremonies. Access is generally by organised event: public ghost hunts are run at the venue by event companies. Book ahead, and dress for a roofless building on a riverside cliff.

There is plenty to see without going inside. The Saxon Mill, the estate's former water-powered mill on the Avon, has been a pub and restaurant since 1952; the riding school in the old stables and the nursery in the former kitchen garden also survive. Blacklow Hill lies to the north-west, and the cliff itself is protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its Middle Triassic sandstone and its fossils of Mastodonsaurus — a reminder that the oldest thing here by far is the rock.