Montacute House is a late Elizabethan country house situated in the South Somerset village of Montacute. This house is a textbook example of English architecture during a period that was moving from the medieval Gothic to the Renaissance Classical; this has resulted in Montacute being regarded as one of the finest houses to survive from the Elizabethan era. It has been designated by English Heritage as a grade I listed building, and Scheduled Ancient Monument. It was visited by 110,529 people in 2009.
Designed by an unknown architect, the three floored mansion, constructed of the local Ham Hill stone, was built circa 1598 by Sir Edward Phelips, Master of the Rolls. His descendants occupied the house until the early 20th century. Following a brief period, when the house was let to tenants, it was acquired by the National Trust in 1927. Today, it is fully open to the public. Since 1975, the mansion's Long Gallery, the longest in England, has served as a regional outpost of the National Portrait Gallery and displays an important collection of oils and watercolours contemporary to the house.
Read more about Montacute House: History, Architecture, Gardens, Present-day Montacute
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“Most books belong to the house and street only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin. They are bare and obvious, and have no halo nor haze about them. Nature lies far and fair behind them all. But this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what is deepest and most abiding in man. It belongs to the noontide of the day, the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)