The Monday Photo

There are manor houses all over England, and we have our fair share of them in North Bucks. One of them is Foscott Manor, near Maids Moreton.

There was a fine house here in 1333, but the present house dates from the 17th Century. It may have replaced that 14th Century house or perhaps an even later one.

I don’t think we’ll ever find out now but what we do know is that an Edward Grenville acquired the property in 1639.

He’s said to have had the present house built in 1656, however there’s an original staircase which the Grade II listing says was built in about 1640. This sort of thing is why we say things like “mid 17th Century”.

The house was very much enlarged and also restored in 1868 and 1908, though this front and the North East front round the corner to our right are from the original build.

Service
The service wing we can see just to the right of the main house is, I think, also 17th Century. To its right and some distance further away is the stable block and coach-house, built in the late 19th Century. It has its own Grade II listing.

Foscott, Foscote or Foxcote, however you might spell it, is just a hamlet now. It’s the site of a lost village which was enclosed after 1625. The narrow, cattle gridded lane through the hamlet joins the Buckingham to Old Stratford road and there's a gate house, "The Lodge" at the junction.

There’s a few earthworks, though there may have been more evidence of settlement in what’s now the heavily landscaped parts of the Manor garden. It’s not unknown though for gardens like this to have paths and roads that partly follow the old village lanes.

It was a never a big village, and the clue is that the church, now a house, is quite small. I featured it in last week’s Monday Photo.