Rudloe Manor: A Historic Manor House and Former RAF Headquarters
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.1
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- British, English
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Manor House
On this page17 sections
History
Rudloe Manor is a historic manor house in the United Kingdom, located at Rudloe on the western outskirts of Corsham. Its earliest recorded history belongs to the early thirteenth century, while the present house is principally a seventeenth-century building rebuilt around 1685. The estate later became a farm, an aristocratic country property, and RAF Rudloe Manor, a wartime and post-war military headquarters.
Medieval Manor and Priory Estate
During the reign of Henry III, who was King of England from 1216 to 1272, a deed by Bartholomew Bigod of Box granted the Rectory of Box and Rudloe, together with all its tithes, to Monkton Farleigh Priory. The priory was a medieval religious house that held the rectory and agricultural dues before the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. Courts Baron, the manorial courts used to administer local customary and estate matters, were held at Rudloe Manor.
The Beauplan family first held the manor around 1216. John Bishop of Riglaze acquired it in 1346, after which ownership passed to the Baldwin family of Ridlaw. In 1465, Thomas Tropenell of Great Chalfield bought the manor house, farm, and lands. The late medieval north wing and its solar, a principal private living room usually placed on an upper floor, belong to this phase of the estate’s development.
The associated tithe barn remained under the priory’s control separately from the manor house until 1539. Its purpose was to store tithes, traditionally a portion of agricultural produce owed to a church or religious institution. The dissolution of the monasteries ended the priory’s control and formed part of the wider transfer of religious property under the Tudor government.
Ownership from the Tudor to Georgian Periods
The Leversegge family acquired the estate in 1568. In 1629 it passed to Sir Edward Hungerford of Farleigh Hungerford Castle, a Member of Parliament who later became Sheriff of Wiltshire. His nephew, also Sir Edward Hungerford, eventually sold the manor to Richard Kent of Corsham.
Thomas Goddard purchased the estate and is credited with rebuilding the manor house around 1685. He died in 1691 and was succeeded by his son Thomas, who died in 1703. The younger Thomas’s memorial brass in Box parish church describes him as “of Rudlow,” linking him directly with the estate.
Around the beginning of the eighteenth century, Jacob Selfe of Melksham owned Rudloe, although Thomas Goddard the younger continued to occupy the house. Selfe’s descendants later intermarried with the Methuen family of Corsham Court, and Rudloe Manor became part of the Methuen estate.
Farm and Country Estate
The 1840 Tithe Award for Box shows Rudloe Manor operating as a working farm with an extensive range of outbuildings. Henry Poulson was the tenant and Henry Hall Joy the owner. The estate retained this agricultural character into the nineteenth century, when Lord Methuen sold Rudloe Manor to Thomas Poynder in 1870. The sale brought the property into the Hartham Park Estate.
The estate was held in trust until 1887 for Poynder’s nephew, Sir John Dickson. He represented Chippenham in Parliament from 1892 to 1910 and was later created Lord Islington. Most of the Hartham Park Estate was divided and sold in 79 lots on 16 May 1918. Captain Francis Daniell bought Rudloe Manor as lot 44, including the manor house, a terraced garden, two cottages, and 371 acres.
Sir Harold Brakspear prepared restoration drawings for Daniell, but the proposed work was not carried out. By 1928 the estate belonged to Sir Felix Brunner, whose plans by Rolfe and Peto proposed major alterations. These included extending the main staircase to the second floor, refitting the original kitchens, and creating formal gardens. Brunner offered the renovated property at auction in Bath in July 1931, when it was purchased by Countess Pappenheim, the American widow of Maximilian Albrecht, Count von Pappenheim.
In 1936 the manor passed to Countess Pappenheim’s daughter, Countess Raben. During her ownership, the stables and farm buildings were converted into additional guest bedrooms and joined to the manor house by a connecting building.
RAF Rudloe Manor
The Air Ministry acquired the estate in 1941, during the Second World War, when the British department responsible for military aviation and the Royal Air Force expanded its command infrastructure. The property became RAF Rudloe Manor, the sector headquarters of No. 10 Group Fighter Command. This regional group coordinated air defence over a designated area of western England under Air Vice Marshal Sir Christopher Quentin Brand.
A wartime operations block was built around a standard operations-room design. An operations room was a military command facility where information, maps, and decisions were coordinated. At Rudloe, a balcony overlooked a map table set in a lower central well. The operations room continued in use until 15 January 1951, when its function moved to an underground operations room in nearby Browns Quarry.
The manor house later served as headquarters for the RAF Provost and Security Services and for Nos. 1 and 1001 Signal Units. These functions remained at the site until November 1998, when they moved to RAF Henlow. The Ministry decommissioned the manor site in 1999, ending almost six decades of military occupation.
Decommissioning and Conservation
After decommissioning, the manor house was placed on the Historic England Heritage at Risk Register. Defence Estates sold the manor, stables, cart shed, and other outbuildings in three lots in 2002. Repeated break-ins and urban exploration between 2002 and 2018 contributed to the deterioration of the buildings, and the manor was declared unsafe to enter in 2019.
Planning consent granted in 2010 permitted nine new houses on the former plantation known as Randells Garden to the north. The development was intended to help safeguard the historic buildings. Essential repairs to the stone-tile roof structures were completed in 2012, and the cart shed was rebuilt in 2016.
Rudloe Manor and its historic buildings returned to private ownership in 2021. The buildings were made safe, urgent stabilisation work was completed, and a restoration programme began to return the site to residential use. The historic orchard was renovated and regenerated in the same year in collaboration with the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol. Genomic testing identified the orchard’s historic fanned apple trees, whose branches spread outward in a fan-shaped arrangement.
In 2022, Professor Timothy Mowl and Carole Fry worked with Historic England, Wiltshire Council, and the National Archives on extensive archival research. Their work produced A History and Structural Development of Rudloe Manor. Rudloe Manor is a Grade II* listed building, a designation in England for a structure of particular importance and more than special interest. The site lies within Box parish, Wiltshire.
Remains
Rudloe Manor stands at the top of Box Hill. Its surviving buildings combine the late medieval fabric of a country manor with the rebuilt seventeenth-century house, agricultural structures, later domestic additions, and twentieth-century military buildings. The former farm enclosure and stable block lie to the north, while operations and administration blocks were constructed south and west of the manor during the RAF occupation. Those wartime additions led to the loss of many formal garden areas.
Manor and Medieval Wing
Seventeenth-Century Manor House
The manor house is principally a seventeenth-century building rebuilt around 1685 under Thomas Goddard. Its present form therefore belongs largely to the period when the estate was being reshaped as a substantial country property. Later proposals for the house included extending the main staircase to the second floor and refitting the kitchens, while the twentieth-century restoration schemes were only partly realised through subsequent conservation work.
Late Medieval North Wing
The north elevation retains a late medieval wing containing a solar, the principal private living room of a medieval or late medieval house. This wing predates Goddard’s rebuilding and preserves part of the earlier domestic arrangement within the later manor house.
Agricultural Buildings and Approach
Tithe Barn
The site includes a twelfth-century tithe barn. Built for the storage of agricultural dues, it belonged to the priory’s separate interest in the estate until 1539. The barn forms part of the historic agricultural group, whose later landscape includes restored gardens to its south.
Cart Shed and Carriage House
A seventeenth-century multi-bay cart shed survives among the agricultural buildings. The site also contains a seventeenth-century carriage house adjoining a former granary. The cart shed was rebuilt in 2016, while stabilisation and restoration work from 2021 addressed the safety and condition of the historic fabric.
Gates, Cottages, and Stable Block
Grade II listed entrance gates and a screen form part of the approach to the manor. The property sold in 1918 included two cottages, a terraced garden, and 371 acres. The former stable and farm buildings were converted into guest accommodation during the 1930s and connected to the manor house by a link building. Together with the wider outbuildings, they reflect the estate’s agricultural and residential uses before its wartime conversion.
Military Remains and Restored Gardens
Operations Buildings
The wartime operations block contained an operations room arranged around a standard design, with a balcony overlooking a map table in a lower well. A separate underground operations room was located in nearby Browns Quarry and took over the room’s function in 1951. The operations and administration blocks built south and west of the manor altered the historic garden layout during the Air Ministry occupation.
Orchard and Gardens
The historic orchard contains fanned apple trees identified through genomic testing. It was renovated and regenerated in 2021. Gardens south of the tithe barn and coach house were restored in 2022 and include a D-shaped pond. These surviving and renewed landscape features form part of the site’s continuing physical relationship between the manor, its agricultural buildings, and its grounds.
