Guests arriving to shoot at Wykeham Abbey in North Yorkshire’s vale of Pickering drive past an imposing Georgian house on their way to rendezvous at the tack room inside the old stable yard. This fine abode has been the seat of the Viscounts Downe, whose family name is Dawnay, since 1909. The Grade II-listed residence is named after a Cistercian nunnery established on the site around 1150, and dissolved so efficiently on the orders of Henry VIII in 1539 that only a single wall of the original priory church remains. The surrounding land extends to some 7,500 acres of arable, pasture and woodland divided by the main Scarborough road into low-lying arable vale and higher ground stretching north towards the North York Moors, where the family own a separate estate and grouse moor at Danby.
With a long-established touring caravan park, a mature plant garden centre, in-hand farming enterprise, forestry and recently developed 85-acre North Yorkshire Water Park on a lake created by gravel extraction, Dawnay is a fine example of a diverse and eclectic modern
