The Priory

There has been a house on this spot since the fifteenth century, and you can feel it. What greets you to day is a handsome Georgian front in a quiet corner of Britwell Salome, below the Chiltern escarpment — a house that has grown gently over five hundred years and is all the better for it. Wide oak boards worn smooth underfoot, fireplaces built for real fires, and floor-to - ceiling sash windows that pull the light deep into the rooms: the character here was earned, not applied.’

The front door opens into a proper reception hall, the kind that sets the tone for a house, with three fine reception rooms leading off it. The drawing room runs to 34 feet, with windows on three sides, so it is bright from breakfast until the light goes; the dining room has an inglenook that comes into its own on winter evenings; and there is a smaller, cosier sitting room for everything in between.

The kitchen is where the house really lives. Timber beams overhead, an Aga at its heart, Shaker cabinetry around a generous island, and room for a table where most of family life will inevitably happen — with a walk-in pantry, a boot room for muddy dogs and wellies, and a quiet study close by.

Upstairs are eight bedrooms, every one a double — a rare thing, and a house party waiting to happen. The principal room looks out on two sides and has its own dressing room and bathroom; two more bedrooms are en suite, and a large family bathroom serves the rest.

The Courtyard and Outbuildings

The drive sweeps past the front door to a courtyard flanked by period barns and outbuildings, and it is here that the Priory - once home to The Priory Vintage Car Company for 22 years since 2000 - reveals its ambitions. One outbuilding holds an office beneath a magnificent double- height vaulted ceiling — a place to work that no commute could rival — with a self- contained two-bedroom flat above the stables, complete with its own reception room, kitchen and bathroom, ready for guests, grandparents or a housekeeper. The great barn offers garaging and storage on a scale that invites ideas: studio, party barn, collection of cars. The potential is considerable.

Glorious Gardens and Grounds

The gardens unfold in a series of rooms of their own. A walled garden hides a folly; a walled kitchen garden with its glasshouse keeps the table supplied through the seasons; and an orchard, immaculate lawns, clipped hedges and fine mature trees do the rest. There is a tennis court, a swimming pool with its own pavilion, and beyond it all a nine-acre field — the full country life, in other words, arranged around a house that has been practising it since the fifteenth century.

The Priory marked on Ordnance Survey maps — was the manor farmhouse of Britwell Prior, an ancient estate whose story begins with a queen’s gift and runs through medieval Canterbury, a lost royal castle and one of Oxfordshire’s great recusant families.

Britwell Salome lies on the spring line at the foot of the Chiltern Hills, where the prehistoric Icknield Way — the oldest road in Britain — cuts through the parish. The village appears in The Domesday Book: held before the Conquest by the Saxon thegn Wulfstan, by 1086 it had passed to Miles Crispin, fi rst castellan of Wallingford Castle, and became part of the great honour of Wallingford. Its curious second name is a corruption of de Sulham, the family who held the manor in the Middle Ages. The parish church of St Nicholas, in part Norman work, has stood since the twelfth century.

Rising behind the house is Castle Hill, site of a small royal castle raised in the early twelfth century. Commanding the road between Watlington and the great fortress at Wallingford, it played its part in the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda — “the Anarchy” — before Henry II ordered it razed after 1154. Tradition holds that its stones were carried down the hill and built into the chapel that once stood beside The Priory.

In the eleventh century Queen Emma — wife of both King Æthelred the Unready and King Cnut — granted part of Britwell to Christ Church Priory, Canterbury. The priory’s lands, tenants and chapel became known as Britwell Prior, a manor and parish in its own right, so thoroughly entangled with its neighbour that in 1685 the vicar despaired of “the greatest intricacy and confusion imaginable” over their boundaries: one little village, he wrote, “made up of two little parishes”, its two churches standing “not above a bow’s shoot from one another”. The Priory was the principal farmhouse of this Canterbury manor — the very heart of Britwell Prior — and its name preserves the connection to this day.

Britwell Salome sits on the rolling chalk country of the Chilterns National Landscape and it is the sort of village that keeps things simple: a good pub, a farm shop, and hills in every direction.

Everything else is a mile up the road in Watlington, a market town that punches well above its size — a proper butcher, a delicatessen, a library, a Co-op, an antique shop, tennis and bowls clubs, and both an Outstanding-rated primary school and a well- regarded secondary. Seven miles away, the Saxon town of Wallingford earns its keep on the Thames: a Waitrose, antique shops and boutiques, a traditional market in the square every Friday, its own cinema and theatre, and a sports park where the cricket, rugby, football, hockey and rowing clubs are all long established. When more is wanted, Henley-on- Thames is ten miles to the southeast and Oxford fourteen to the northeast.

For all its seclusion, The Priory is easily reached: the M40 is four miles away, putting London, the M25 and the Midlands within comfortable range, while trains run from Didcot Parkway (about 12 miles) to Paddington in around 40 minutes, and from Princes Risborough (about 11 miles) to Marylebone in much the same time.

Schools

Schooling is a particular strength of this Schooling is a particular strength of this corner of Oxfordshire. The prep schools at Moulsford on the Thames — Moulsford Prep and Cranford School — are within twenty minutes, with Rupert House at Henley and The Oratory Prep at Goring Heath close behind. Senior options run from The Oratory at Woodcote and Shiplake College near Henley to Abingdon, St Helen & St Katharine and Radley, while Oxford brings Magdalen College School, the Dragon, Summer Fields, Headington and Oxford High within reach; Wycombe Abbey, Pangbourne College and Eton College complete the picture.