01/06/2026
Last week, summer made one of its characteristically brief appearances in England. For a few glorious hours, the weather was positively warm by local standards, and we decided that spending such a day working would be a criminal waste. We began searching for somewhere new to explore.
The challenge was that after several years of living in the Cotswolds, we have already visited a considerable portion of it. Finding somewhere genuinely unfamiliar required more effort than expected.
Eventually, we settled on a place called Wychwood Wild Garden, described as a semi-wild woodland reserve maintained by a team of volunteers.
When we arrived, however, we found ourselves standing on the main road running through the village of Shipton-under-Wychwood. On one side stood the gates of a magnificent country house. Opposite it stretched a tree-lined avenue leading towards the supposedly wild garden.
It required very little detective work to connect the dots.
The "wild garden" was, in fact, what remained of the original grounds belonging to the estate across the road.
And once again, it provided a fascinating answer to a question that has occupied much of this series: what happens when castles disappear? Or when they are abandoned? Or when they cease to be castles at all?
The answer, more often than not, is demolition.
During the 1950s alone, some 2,000 country houses and estates were destroyed across England as their owners fell into financial ruin and could no longer maintain them. Fortunately, not all suffered that fate. A fortunate minority survived through a variety of means. Some became luxury hotels (a subject for a future article). Around 300 were rescued by the National Trust and opened to the public. Others acquired stranger destinies.
Over the years, our castle hunts have brought us to several such survivors.
There was Brancepeth Castle in northern England, saved in the 1980s by a publishing family who sold their London home in order to buy and restore it. There was Margam Castle near Port Talbot, which narrowly escaped destruction by fire and today stands magnificent from the outside, largely empty within, maintained by an enthusiastic army of volunteers.
Shipton Manor belongs firmly in this final category.
The house itself was built in 1603 by the Lacy family, who occupied it until 1663, after which it passed into the hands of the Reade family. Like any respectable country estate, it was surrounded by extensive gardens, complete with ornamental lakes and landscaped grounds.
The Reades were wealthy landed gentry, holders of a baronetcy, and the future of the estate appeared secure.
Then, inevitably, things began to go wrong.
The trouble began at eleven o'clock on the night of 1 June 1843.
Like every substantial country house of the period, Shipton Manor was equipped with a system of servant bells. From virtually any room in the house, the owners could summon members of staff, each bell indicating the precise location from which the call originated.
That evening, one of those bells rang from the private sitting room of the master of the house, Sir John Chandos Reade—a county sheriff, local notable, and, by all accounts, a man with a rather enthusiastic relationship with alcohol.
Because the call came from his private room, the summons fell to his personal butler, John Sinden.
A few minutes later, a dull thud echoed through the house.
Shortly afterwards, Sinden staggered back towards the servants' quarters with a severe wound to his head. Witnesses later recalled hearing him mutter, “One blow did it,” before collapsing and dying.
An investigation was launched with commendable speed and an equally commendable lack of curiosity.
The verdict was accidental death.
According to the official account, the butler had entered the room, tripped, and struck his head on the metal surround of the lit fireplace. Every servant in the household supported this version of events. One of them, a servant named John Wakefield, went even further, testifying that Sinden himself had been drunk on the evening in question.
The testimony proved persuasive.
The parish records—which can still be consulted today in the local church—record that John Sinden died from traumatic injury sustained while intoxicated.
Had matters ended there, the story would have been entirely forgettable.
They did not.
Within days, alternative rumours were circulating throughout the village. Sinden's widow claimed that the authorities had prevented her from viewing her husband's body before burial, allegedly because the injuries would have raised uncomfortable questions about the official version of events.
Meanwhile, Sir John Chandos Reade's reputation did little to discourage speculation. His fondness for drink was widely known, and many villagers considered it entirely plausible that he had simply struck his servant during a drunken altercation.
The mystery deepened some twenty years later.
When the baronet died, his family made a startling discovery. Reade had altered his will and left the estate not to his relatives, but to none other than John Wakefield—the very servant whose testimony had helped secure the accidental-death verdict.
The inheritance raised obvious questions.
Was this a reward for loyalty? A payment for silence? Compensation for a carefully crafted piece of courtroom fiction?
Or was something more complicated involved?
Another theory soon emerged. Wakefield, some suggested, was in fact Reade's illegitimate son.
Such arrangements were hardly unheard of in nineteenth-century country houses. Wealthy landowners frequently fathered children with servants, governesses, or local women, and not infrequently found discreet ways to provide for them. Whether the rumours were true is impossible to establish today, but they proved remarkably persistent.
Whatever the explanation, Wakefield inherited the estate, adopted the surname Reade, and continued to live at Shipton Manor until the early years of the twentieth century.
After his death, the house entered a long decline.
This is where the story begins to intersect with the landscape visible today.
As modernity reached the Cotswolds, the village's main road was driven directly between the house and its gardens, severing an estate that had once been designed as a single coherent landscape. Over the decades, the formal grounds deteriorated and much of their original character disappeared.
The manor itself survived, albeit in altered form. In the early 2020s, a developer acquired the property and converted it into a number of private apartments.
The gardens, meanwhile, enjoyed a happier fate.
They were donated for public use and gradually evolved into what is now Wychwood Wild Garden. Fragments of the original ornamental lakes still survive, while dedicated volunteers maintain the grounds, creating something that feels less like a formal historic garden and more like an idealised version of an English woodland.
In other words, a place that appears effortlessly natural only because generations of people have worked very hard to make it look that way.
One of the apartments within the manor is currently for sale, which means that anyone who has ever dreamed of living in an English country house now has an opportunity to do exactly that.
Before you rush off to submit an offer, however, there is one final detail worth mentioning.
Following the death of Sir John Chandos Reade, stories began to circulate that the manor was haunted.
The rumours became sufficiently widespread that they eventually attracted national attention. According to Anthony D. Hippisley Cox, a researcher of supposedly haunted houses writing in the twentieth century, a group of clergymen once assembled in one of the rooms of the manor to conduct an exorcism.
The ceremony, he claimed, successfully trapped the spirit of the deceased baronet.
The room was then sealed.
Unfortunately, this was long before the building was converted into apartments, and nobody seems to know exactly which room was involved.
So if any of you do decide to purchase the property, it may be wise to keep that possibility in mind.
I promise to write again soon.
The castle chase has begun once more.
More or less.
Link to righmove in case you are looking to move to a haunted castle:
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/163797248?utm_campaign=property-details&utm_content=buying&utm_medium=sharing&utm_source=copytoclipboard #/&channel=RES_BUY
