Day 181 - Snowshill Manor and the art of collecting

Snowshill Manor

The sublime and the strange. This may be the best way to describe Snowshill Manor, a 16th century house located in the pretty village of the same name in the Cotswold hills near Broadway. The house is now owned by the National Trust, a charitable organization that works to preserve England's heritage and open spaces. They look after "coastline, forests, woods, fens, beaches, farmland, moorland, islands, archaeological remains, nature reserves, villages, historic houses, gardens, mills and pubs, and one of the world's largest art collections."

A small part of the music
collection.

Snowshill Manor's fame actually has more to do with its 20th century owner than any other previous occupant or the fact that it's been around since the 1500s. It's last owner was a man names Charles Paget Wade. Wade was an architect, craftsman and poet who gained from his grandmother a love of collecting interesting handmade items that took his fancy.


Wade's family was in the sugar business, with estates on St. Kitts in the West Indies. So, when his father died in 1911, he inherited his share of the business. Wade served in the First World War, a period when many manors and their contents in England were being lost to death duties and income taxes. Wade spotted an advertisement for Snowshill Manor in a Cottage Life magazine while in France near the end of the war, and purchased the property, which contained a few other buildings.

Which bicycle to ride today?

He also took advantage of the offers available on handmade items, many of which were also being sold off by estates. A craftsman himself, he had a interest in anything that required a high level of skill to create. His artistic, colourful and sometimes humorous taste was used to amass an unusual collection of more than 22,000 objects, including Oriental cabinets, intricate large-scale ship models, art, bicyles, carriages, swords, musical instruments, books, carvings, toys, costumes ... well, the list goes on and on. Basically, he collected items that caught his eye rather than based on their value. He put them all together not as a museum, but in a way he felt would be of most interest to the viewer.

Wade didn't buy Snowshill Manor to live in, opting to live in the adjacent and equally interesting Priest's House. Snowshill Manor was meant to house his collection. Visiting friends stayed in bedrooms in the house bedecked with Tudor beds and surround by items in his collection.

The garden gate invites you in.

He laid out the gardens in the Arts and Crafts style, making each section have a room-like feel to it. In one section of the garden, he even built a model of a Cornish seaside village, called Wolf's Cove, complete with water and seawall (currently being restored).

Phil and I made the visit to Snowshill Manor as part of a 21-km walk. We took the bus from Moreton to the Broadway Tower Country Park, then made our way down the back country roads to the village. On the way, we passed the Cotswold Lavender Farm, which opens from June to August. The lavender has not yet started to sprout its leaves and flowers, but you can see fields and fields of plants in their winter form and just imagine what it must look ... and smell ... like at the height of the season.

Time for tea!

Once at the manor, we first stopped first for tea, while we waited for our timed entry to the house. As you can imagine, the house of a collector is crowded, so space is tight.

After visiting the manor for an hour or so, we walked into the village and had lunch at the local pub, the Snowshill Arms. The village itself is one of the most idyllic we have seen in the Cotwolds. It's nestled in the hillsides of a valley making it almost impossible to see as you approach it.

The pretty village of Snowshill.

From here, we made the 8-mile walk back to Moreton down mostly single-lane country roads...except for brief bit along the verge of an A-road.  But, it proved easy going ... and we soon had our feet up for a much deserved rest on the sofas in our lounge!