IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Nympsfield, STONEHOUSE, GL10 3UN

Taken from a track in Woodchester Park.

Never finished a hundred years ago - this is the interior of the entrance hall. If you go in the tea room you can walk through some of it without having to pay for a guided tour - but you have to walk from the NT car park! The mansion trust runs a minibus down for those paying for a tour, from a separate car park on the crossroads.

Two-horned Jacob sheep taking it easy in the watery afternoon sunshine in a paddock behind the Gothic pile.

Woodchester Park, a quiet wooded valley to the south of Stroud was bought by William Leigh, a devout convert to the Roman Catholic church, in 1845 for £100,000. He planned to build a mansion, initially commissioning Pugin, co-architect of the newly built Palace of Westminster, to design a new house in the fashionable Gothic style. However, having designed the house Pugin withdrew from the project, the work was continued by the 21 year old Benjamin Bucknall who used much of Pugin's design along with his own. The house was never completed and William Leigh died in 1873. The house is now in the care of the Woodchester Mansion Trust http://www.woodchestermansion.org.uk/ and the park is in the care of the National Trust.

One of the gables of the unfinished Victorian Woodchester Mansion.

At the end of the metal fencing on the left is a cattle crush that is used to keep cows in place for veterinary and other procedures. Fans of veterinary programmes on the telly will be familiar with the principle. The position is a best guess.

The Mansion at Woodchester Park is incomplete, it replaced a Georgian country house called Spring Park, which was first built at the beginning of the 17th century.

Detail of Woodchester Mansion a house built, but never completed for William Leigh in the mid-nineteenth century. See: http://www.woodchestermansion.org.uk/

Woodchester Park, a quiet wooded valley to the south of Stroud was bought by William Leigh, a devout convert to the Roman Catholic church, in 1845 for £100,000. He planned to built a mansion, initially commissioning Pugin, co-architect of the newly built Palace of Westminster, to design a new house in the fashionable Gothic style. However, having designed the house Pugin withdrew from the project, the work was continued by the 21 year old Benjamin Bucknall who used much of Pugin's design along with his own. The house was never completed and William Leigh died in 1873. The house is now in the care of the Woodchester Mansion Trust http://www.woodchestermansion.org.uk/ and the park is in the care of the National Trust.