Waterston Manor: A Historic Country House in Puddletown, Dorset
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 5
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Modern
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- British, English
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Manor House
On this page6 sections
History
Waterston Manor is an early seventeenth-century country house in Puddletown, United Kingdom. The estate belonged to the Earls of Suffolk before Sir John Strangways purchased the manor in 1641. It remained in the Strangways family until 1911, including the period after the family became the Earls of Ilchester in 1756.
Strangways Ownership and Rebuilding
The house underwent extensive rebuilding after a fire in 1863. In 1911, Percy Richard Morley Horder remodelled the manor and laid out its gardens. That same year, the property was sold to Captain Gerald Carter, ending the long association between Waterston Manor and the Strangways family.
Literary and Heritage Associations
Waterston Manor inspired Weatherbury Farm in Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd, published in 1874. Hardy was an English novelist and poet whose fiction often drew on Dorset landscapes and communities, while Weatherbury is the novel’s fictional rural setting.
The manor became a Grade I listed building on 26 January 1956. Grade I is the highest listing category in England and Wales, reserved for buildings of exceptional architectural or historic interest.
Remains
The Manor House
The house has two storeys and an attic, with walls built from ashlar and brick. Its south front remains predominantly seventeenth-century, preserving the principal character of the early house, while the east front belongs to the nineteenth-century rebuilding. The interiors are almost entirely nineteenth- and twentieth-century in date, reflecting the substantial changes made after the fire and during the later remodelling.
Gateways, Stables, and Garden Boundaries
The wider site includes gate piers, stables, and garden walls. The gate piers and stables, together with some of the garden walls, have separate Grade II listings, recognising these associated elements as distinct historic structures within the manor’s grounds.
Nearby sites
