Dorset families did well under the Tudors, and many passed their good fortune on to us in the houses they built. The Trenchards of Wolveton, in the water-meadows west of Dorchester, put up one of the finest. John Trenchard inherited Wolveton through his mother, Christian Mohun, in 1480 and began work on the house. Sir Thomas Trenchard completed the Gatehouse in the reign of Henry VIII. Most of Sir Thomas’s house was demolished in the 1820s, leaving the lavish Elizabethan wing, erected by Sir George Trenchard. What remains is exceptional: windows with the delicate decoration of the Tudor Renaissance, an Elizabethan display of glass and much moulded oak and plaster.

The present owner opens his home to the public and has also repaired and furnished the Gatehouse, which we now let on his behalf. On two of its corners are twin towers from an earlier fortified gatehouse. Thought to be fourteenth century, each has a dovecot in its top. The two rooms on the first floor were, and still are, fitted out for guests. They are reached by a wide and ancient spiral stair in which newel post and tread are carved of single blocks, not of stone but of oak. Both have Jacobean fireplaces, and turret rooms leading off them. A garret above and the guardroom below provide extra bedrooms. In winter, stoke up the fire and wear an extra layer, as the Dorset nobility would have done hundreds of years ago.

The Gatehouse once framed the approach to a grand forecourt and the great of many kinds have passed through it. Today it reminds us of the noble house that Wolveton once was. Thomas Hardy came to tea at Wolveton in 1900 and the tragic tale of Lady Penelope D’Arcy, the second wife of George Trenchard, appears in his book of short stories, A Group of Noble Dames.

Sleeps: 6