South Dorset Manor Houses

Enjoy exclusive owner-guided tours of two exceptional and contrasting Dorset manor houses.

Discover the Grade II* Manor at Winterborne Tomson, dating from 1600 with surviving Tudor elements and a history tied to figures including Thomas, Earl of Charburrow and the Husey and Bankes families; described by Pevsner as a building with “real architectural interest”. The ground floor has three original stone mullioned windows with lead lights and a large stone fireplace. There are fine 17th-century ornamental plastered ceilings with rose, crown and fleurs de lys motifs and an impressive stone spiral staircase. Our tour will include the exquisite garden and the church of St. Andrew’s, one of only four English single-celled Norman churches with an apsidal east end, original buttresses and a Norman window, the rest being 16th century. The church was a favourite of Thomas Hardy and once housed animals, saved using funds from Hardy’s manuscripts. 

Creech Grange (Image © Mike Searle / Creech Grange)

Later, explore Grade I Creech Grange, fragments of which date from the original house built by Sir Oliver Lawrence in 1559, the brother-in-law of Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton. The house was damaged during the Civil War and was subsequently sold to Nathaniel Bond in 1691. It stands on an artificially levelled terrace towards the centre of its 135-acre Grade II* parkland. The building is constructed in ashlar under stone slate roofs and comprises two storeys and an attic. The east façade is Tudor-Gothic, rebuilt by the Rev Nathaniel Bond in 1846, with a full-height projecting central porch and projecting gabled wings at each end, and lit by mullioned windows, while the south-east wing is lit by a 16th-century oriel window. The south façade, constructed in 1738-41, and designed by Francis Cartwright for Denis Bond, is classical in style and comprises seven bays with a projecting central section beneath a pediment, the outer corners articulated by rusticated quoins.

Tickets £102 including a two-course lunch at Clavells Restaurant. Lunch options to be made available to attendees in August 2026.