Hatherop sits above the river, and the story of this place is more about the land, the families who owned and cared for it, than the buildings that sit on it.

For a start the Castle isn’t a castle. It’s a splendid house with a castellated tower, but whilst the tower is probably medieval, the building was severely damaged by fire in 1844, just a few years ago by the standards of this part of the world, and completely rebuilt, starting in 1850, by the architect Henry Clutton, an expert in French medieval architecture.

In 1854, whilst the castle rebuild was still going on, Clutton also rebuilt the church next door, along with his protégé William Burges, whose influence is clearly seen in the mortuary South chapel, on behalf of the de Mauley family. A white marble effigy of Barbara, Lady de Mauley, who died in 1844, lies in the chapel.

In the mid19th century the whole 3000 acre estate was bought by a wealthy cotton spinner from Lancashire called Bazley.

Bazley’s heir was his son, Sir Thomas Stafford Bazley (1907-97), 3rd bt., who came of age in 1928 and lived at Hatherop until the house was requisitioned for military use in 1941.

He was married in 1945 but any idea of returning to live at Hatherop Castle in the pre-war manner, with dozens of staff to look after them, and a life of largely leasurely pursuits, must have seemed impossibly remote, (have we not seen that very situation discussed in detail in the television series Downton Abbey?) and in 1946 he leased the house for use as the aforementioned girls’ secondary school and went to live at Eastleach Downs Farm on the estate, where he became an early advocate for organic farming.