Our three-day spring UK study trip to Dorset will include visits to major houses in Dorset: Kingston Lacy, Sherborne Castle, and Mapperton House, as well as a private tour of Sherborne Abbey, a visit to John Makepeace’s house and collection and other visits to private historic houses.

Kingston Lacy was owned by generations of the Bankes family, but its appearance today is shaped by William John Bankes, who inherited the house in 1834 and commissioned Sir Charles Barry to remodel the original 1660s house designed by Sir Roger Pratt, and clad the red-brick exterior in stone.  Living abroad from 1841, William continued to devote himself to the house, collecting furniture, antiquities, sculpture and art to send back to Kingston Lacy to join the collection of fine art and antiquities built up over many years by his family. Our tour will be led by Property Curator Elena Greer. 

Sherborne Castle, owned by the Digby family since 1617, houses an outstanding collection Georgian and Regency furniture and art.  Built for Sir Walter Raleigh in 1594, and extended by Sir John Digby in a sympathetic style, the exterior of the Castle features heraldic beasts and hexagonal turrets. The house contains fine eighteenth-century furniture - eminent cabinet makers such as Pierre Langlois and Mayhew and Ince are named in the accounts - and a fine Gothic-style library remodelled in 1757-8. Our visit will be outside public opening hours.

Mapperton House, a fine example of an early manor house and the home of the Earl and Countess of Sandwich, has a fine collection of English furniture and paintings. The house was rebuilt in the seventeenth century on the site of the Tudor manor house of the 1540s, with the addition of the hall and west front, and further altered in the eighteenth century. Plaster panelling and fireplaces survive from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the drawing room, heraldic lions and griffins, representing the families who owned the house, appear in the Tudor ceiling.

Our accommodation will be at the Royal Chase Hotel in Shaftesbury. 

Full details are available from the Events Secretary, events@furniturehistorysociety.org, on request and will appear in the February Newsletter. 

The Hall at Mapperton House