Future Events
Visit to Bisterne Manor
Thursday, 22nd May 2025
Bisterne Manor is a beautiful home, set in a 4000 acre estate in the New Forest. Since 1349 only four families have lived at Bisterne and all four are closely related. The heart of the present-day house was built in 1520. Two wings were added in 1652 and in 1834 and in late Victorian times the house was altered again.
Owned by Hallam and Lal Mills, it is not open to the public, but Hallam and Lal have agreed to show us around the house and will tell us about its history and describe life below stairs as well as above. The Manor is very much a family home but it contains many beautiful paintings and fine furniture, partially acquired when Francis Mills, an ancestor, went on his 19th century Grand Tour. There are a variety of fascinating objects which reflect the family’s history, for instance from the Peninsula War, as well as their roots in England, Belgium and America.
Hallam is very much a hands-on dairy and arable farmer at Bisterne Farms. He is a former Verderer of the New Forest and is a Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire. If there’s an opportunity, it may be possible for Hallam and his Game and Wildlife Manager to describe some of the conservation work which has become so important at Bisterne – in 2024 they counted 122 different species of birds including curlews, lapwings, red shanks and woodcock – and they have reintroduced the water vole as well as running many other conservation projects.
Visit to Apethorpe Palace
Tuesday, 17th June 2025
We have been given a very special opportunity by Baron and Baroness Pfetten of taking a small party round Apethorpe Palace. Baroness Pfetten has very kindly agreed to guide us round herself.
Apethorpe Palace holds a particularly important place in English history. Owned by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, it then became a much loved royal residence of James I and Charles I, who both regularly lived there, with James I adding a series of state rooms. It is one of the very finest Jacobean houses in the country to survive.
The Mildmay family, who had taken possession of the manor in 1551, and their successors, the Fanes, Earls of Westmoreland, remained at Apethorpe until 1904 when it was bought by Leonard Brassey MP. In 1939 the house was requisitioned and after the war became an approved school. When the school closed the house deteriorated until in 2004, it was compulsorily purchased by the government, the second of only two cases of such purchase. English Heritage then did some essential works on the structure and roof before Baron and Baroness Pfetten took on ownership and the massive task of restoration in 2014.
From that moment the Pfettens have achieved a staggering resurgence of this huge and magnificent palace. Their exemplary programme of repair and refurbishment has taken Apethorpe from a place where, in 2004, much of the building was on the verge of collapse, to a family home where the great state rooms used by James I, together with restored lost interiors such as the Library, Orangery and White Hall must rank among the finest in the country. Country Life, which has devoted a large part of two recent editions to the house concludes in summing up Apethorpe: ‘The stuff of dreams’.