Hinton Ampner Estate Gardens including the Walled Garden - A South Downs National Park Manor House

Hinton Ampner is a village and country house estate with gardens and former civil parish, now in the parish of Bramdean and Hinton Ampner, in the Winchester district, in the county of Hampshire, England. It is near Alresford and eight miles due east of Winchester. The name probably derives from a combination of old English words Hea (high ground), Tun (homestead) and Higna (home of the monks), with the suffix Ampner being a corruption of Almoner, as the manor was once attached to a priory landholding.
The house is a Grade II listed building. The house and garden are owned by the National Trust and are open to the public.
History
The area around Hinton has evidence of Neolithic and Bronze Age settlement, including the presence of several barrows. The first record of the village was in the Domesday survey of 1086 which recorded 8 Hides and a church.
In the 1540s, a large Tudor Manor House was built in Hinton Ampner. By 1597, the house was under the ownership of the Stewkeley family, when Thomas Stewkeley took over the lease from the Dean and Chapter of Winchester. In 1719, on the death of Sir Hugh Stewkeley, the estate passed to his daughter Mary who married Edward Stawell. Their descendant, Henry Stawell Bilson-Legge subsequently inherited the estate and demolished the Tudor house in favour of a new building (the old house being on the site of the present day orchard).
The current Hinton Ampner house was built in 1793 and remodelled extensively in 1867. The house passed into the Dutton family in 1803 when Mary Bilson-Legge married John Dutton. It passed to their son, James Dutton, 3rd Baron Sherborne, whose descendants owned the estate until it passed to the National Trust. The house was again remodelled again in the Neo-Georgian style by Trenwith Wills and Lord Gerald Wellesley for Ralph Dutton between 1936 and 1939 to his vision of what it would have been like had it been built on its current scale in 1790 - a Georgian country house. As part of this work, a reproduction of a ceiling by Robert Adam, due to be demolished at 38 Berkeley Square in London, was recreated in the dining room. This involved detaching the original painted paper roundels by Angelica Kauffman and taking moulds of Adam's plasterwork. The work was completed in 1940 but later largely destroyed, including all Kauffman's work, by the 1960 fire.
During the Second World War, the house was used as accommodation for girls from the Portsmouth Girls School to keep them away from the city. The house was badly damaged by fire in 1960, and restored again much as it had appeared in 1936, while the current garden layout of the house was created by Ralph Stawell Dutton (1898-1985), the 8th and last Baron Sherborne, starting in 1930, making this a modern 20th-century garden. Previously, the parkland came directly up to the house, which was designed to be a hunting lodge. The property is now noted both for the house and extensive gardens. The house contains a number of fine paintings. Amongst them is a pair of paintings, probably from an original set of the four seasons in the manner of Jacob de Wit, depicting putti painted in a three-dimensional grisaille style.
Ralph Dutton, with no direct heirs, gave the estate to the National Trust, on his death in 1985.
We enjoyed are stroll around the gardens in beautiful weather
#wanderlust #nationaltrust #garden #beautiful #hikingculture