LAST week saw the launch onto the market of the pristine, 206-acre Woodcote Manor estate with its handsome, Grade II*-listed manor house, set in a private wooded valley overlooking its own historic park, farmland and the surrounding South Downs National Park, half a mile east of the village of Bramdean, five miles from the Georgian market town of Alresford and 10 miles from Winchester. The sale is being handled by Geoff Jones of Savills in Winchester (07870 387700) and Crispin Holborow of the Savills country department (07967 555511), who quote a guide price of £15 million for the impeccably restored estate as a whole.
The manor of Woodcote dates from the late 12th century, although the remains of a Roman villa in the grounds suggest that this was already a place of importance in ancient (1908), the manor was acquired by the Venables family between 1663 and 1667 and remained with them until the death of Catharine Venables in 1789, when it descended to her kinsman, Edward Hooper of Hurn Court, a former MP for Christchurch, who only visited it occasionally and left it on his death to the Earl of Malmesbury. In 1809, the Earl sold Woodcote to a speculator called Lipscombe, who, when Mr Greenwood of Brockwood was deliberating on the purchase, bought the place and felled the timber. Greenwood, however, apparently ‘repented of his mistake and eventually bought the manor without the timber at the price he had demurred to give for the estate, which remained in the Greenwood family until September 29, 1900, when Mr Ulick Burke, the then lord of the manor, purchased it’.
