There's something quietly thrilling about standing in a house built in 1539 by a man whose great-great-grandson would cross the Atlantic and help found a nation. Sulgrave Manor sits in a village just south of Banbury, handsome and unshowy, telling the story of the Washington family and the generations who came after them. It's a comfortable drive from the cottage, and well worth the detour.
Lawrence Washington, a wool merchant who had done rather well for himself, bought the priory land at Sulgrave after the Dissolution of the Monasteries and built his family a house from the stone. The Washington family coat of arms, with its stars and stripes, is carved above the doorway. (Yes, those stars and stripes. The resemblance to a certain flag is no coincidence.) The manor passed through several families over the centuries, each leaving their own mark: Tudor stonework, Jacobean oak panelling, a kitchen garden that still grows the herbs a seventeenth-century household would have relied on. In 1914, with the centenary of the Treaty of Ghent approaching, a group of subscribers on both sides of the Atlantic bought the house and restored it as a symbol of Anglo-American friendship.
What makes Sulgrave so appealing is its scale. This is not a grand stately home with roped-off corridors and audioguides. It's a comfortable manor house where you can peer into cupboards, run your hand along oak beams, and chat to the knowledgeable volunteers who seem to know every family scandal going back five centuries. The gardens are lovely in summer, with a particularly fine collection of old roses. Children tend to enjoy the place more than you might expect; there's something about the low doorways and uneven flagstones that appeals to the imagination. Allow a couple of hours, and try to time your visit with one of their open days or living-history events if you can.
“It's one of those places where a small house tells a very large story. You walk in thinking Tudor manor, you walk out thinking about the Atlantic, independence, and how history turns on a wool merchant's ambition.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.