General & History

The River House is a beautifully decorated holiday home built in Cotswold stone and set in a private garden amidst pretty countryside on the Oxfordshire/Gloucestershire border. This five bedroom detached house is the largest of twelve luxury self catering cottages converted from the stable courtyard and outbuildings of an imposing 18th century Adam style mansion that stands just opposite, its Baroque features visible against the tree line. The mansion was built in 1720 by a British General and the courtyard was a later addition to the property, completed in 1882, to accommodate the horses, carriages and grooms of the main house.

The mansion provides a splendid backdrop and guests staying at The River House also benefit from exceptionally pretty views across its park and the peace and privacy provided by the wooded estate. This is a historic corner of the Cotswolds and was the site of an earlier 12th century Cistercian abbey – it appears that the 18th century house was constructed over the ancient building's foundations, so it is referred to as an abbey. The resident monks reared sheep as English wool was then the most highly prized and priced in Europe, and Cotswold wool was particularly valued. Today visitors will still see pastoral scenes of grazing sheep when strolling through the grounds and along the country lanes.

The Abbey and its Monks suffered various ups and downs from financial instability in the 13th century to suppression by Henry VIII in the 16th century along with every other abbey and convent in England. The only remaining relics of the old Abbey are the monastic fishpond and a few carved stones that turn up when building works take place at the site, also a mysterious vaulted room incorporated into the current owner's house nearby that may have been a chapel, a more mundane explanation being that it was a cold room for storing fish from the pond.

Just after the Second World War the Abbey and its estate were bought by the third son of a renowned and powerful Anglo-American family. It became a bustling home with an estate cricket team, an estate club in the Abbey courtyard and at weekends it attracted an idiosyncratic and colourful cross-section of post-war English society with a bias towards politics, literature and the arts, the bill of fare ranging from ballooning to croquet. The family sold the Abbey in the 1970s moving into the pretty redbrick Georgian house on the grounds where they still reside. They retained land, the stable courtyard and outbuildings. In the 1980s a sensitive renovation programme began, culminating in the immaculate five star holiday accommodation seen at the property today.