A house for a queen
Ashdown House stands on its own in the downs about 7 km (4½ miles) south of Uffington village, in Ashbury parish. It was built by William Craven, 1st Earl of Craven, one of the richest men in 17th-century England and a soldier who had fought in Europe for Frederick, Elector Palatine. Frederick and his wife Elizabeth, the daughter of James I, reigned as King and Queen of Bohemia for a single winter in 1619–20 before being driven into exile, which is why she is remembered as the Winter Queen.
Craven supported Elizabeth for decades after her husband’s death and was devoted to her; he never married. His estates were confiscated by Parliament during the Civil War and restored in 1660, when Charles II also made him an earl. The National Trust says he meant Ashdown as a country hunting lodge for Elizabeth, safe from the plague outbreaks in London, but she died in 1662 before it was finished. She left him her papers and portraits, and many of the portraits hang in the house today.
The building
The house looks like a doll’s house set on end: a square block of chalk blocks with grey Bath stone dressings, three storeys over a basement, with a steep roof topped by a balustraded platform and an octagonal cupola crowned by a gilded ball. The cupola lights the central staircase, which climbs the full height of the house. The national list dates it to about 1662 and says it was probably designed by Captain William Winde; the Victoria County History (1924) gave about 1665 and repeated a tradition that the designer was John Webb. As first built it stood in the middle of a wood, with four avenues leading to it, one on each side. By 1924 only the western avenue survived.
Lord Bolingbroke is said to have used the house as a retreat at the end of Queen Anne’s reign. The last of the Craven family left in 1926, and the house was given to the National Trust in 1956.
Alfred’s Castle
About 500 metres west of the house is Alfred’s Castle, a small hillfort with a single bank and ditch, standing on Swinley Down where two routes cross the downs from the Vale to the Lambourn valley. Oxford University excavated it between 1998 and 2000, as part of a project that had already dug at Uffington Castle and Segsbury Camp. The work showed that the fort was built in the 6th century BC inside an older landscape of late Bronze Age boundary ditches, with a larger enclosure attached to it that now shows only as a cropmark. Much later, in the late 1st century AD, a Romano-British farmhouse was built inside the abandoned earthwork. The full report was published in 2014.
The name comes from antiquaries who linked the fort with King Alfred and the Battle of Ashdown in 871. There is no evidence for this, and nobody knows where the battle was fought.
Visiting
The Ashdown estate belongs to the National Trust. The house is let to a tenant and opens on set days by guided tour, which includes the climb to the roof; the woods, the hillfort and the lines of sarsen stones in the valley nearby can be reached on foot. Opening arrangements change, so check the Trust’s website first. The Ridgeway, Wayland’s Smithy and the White Horse are all within a few miles.