Montacute House

Montacute House is one of the finest and most complete Elizabethan mansions in England — a superlative work of late sixteenth-century architecture built from the warm golden Ham Hill stone quarried nearby in Somerset, and surrounded by gardens of extraordinary beauty and historic significance. It stands as one of the great achievements of Elizabethan building ambition and craftsmanship, and a visit to Montacute is an experience that few English historic houses can rival.

The house was built between approximately 1597 and 1601 for Sir Edward Phelips, a successful lawyer who rose to become Speaker of the House of Commons and is perhaps best known today as the chief prosecutor at the trial of Guy Fawkes following the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The family commissioned a house of extraordinary scale and architectural ambition, deploying the full vocabulary of Elizabethan Renaissance ornament — shaped gables, obelisks, shell-headed niches with statues of the Nine Worthies, large mullioned and transomed windows, and elaborate surface decoration — in a composition of remarkable symmetry and confidence.

The Long Gallery on the top floor is Montacute's most magnificent interior — at approximately 172 feet one of the longest in England, running the full breadth of the house in a single, luminous space. The gallery is hung with a superb collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean portrait paintings on long-term loan from the National Portrait Gallery in London, a partnership that places these remarkable paintings — many of them major works of the period — in a setting of perfect historical appropriateness. Tudor monarchs, courtiers, nobles, and scholars gaze down from the walls in a display that is both artistically and historically outstanding.

The house retains fine period furniture, textiles, and decorative arts throughout its rooms, and the interiors convey a strong sense of the Elizabethan world at its most confident and prosperous. The National Trust, which acquired the house in 1931, has maintained and presented it with characteristic care.

The formal gardens are a major attraction in their own right. The great terraced forecourt with its balustraded walls, corner pavilions, and ornamental ponds gives the house an approach of theatrical grandeur. The walled garden contains the National Collection of old and species roses — one of the finest collections in the country — which is at its glorious peak in June. The wider grounds include kitchen garden and parkland walks. Montacute is an hour from Bristol and easily combined with visits to other Somerset attractions.