Origins

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The Wolfeton estate passed to John Trenchard by marriage in 1480.  Its opulence allowed the family to compete in the great game of one-upmanship with other well-to-do Dorset families, extending the magnificent Wolfeton House and constructing the neighbouring Riding House.

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​Historic England dates the Riding House to 'the late 16th Century'.  A recent scientific dating using tree-ring analysis of the oak timbers tells us that three of the beams were felled before 1603 and most likely in the 1590s. 

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This makes it the earliest of the six Riding Houses constructed in England, pre-dating The  Riding House at St. James's Palace in London, now demolished, built soon after for Henry, Prince of Wales, son of King James I, and which it closely resembled.

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Purpose

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The ground floor would have been used for the teaching and demonstration of the equestrian tradition of haute école, the precision schooling of horses similar to that still demonstrated today by the famous Lipizzaner horses of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, Austria.

 

Although this extravagant French and Italian style of riding had been practised in England from the early 16th Century, a gift of a team of trained horses from the French King Henry IV to King James I made it popular amongst young English noblemen.

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King Charles I was a highly skilled haute école practitioner and the famous portrait by Sir Anthony van Dyck shows the King with the royal riding master Monsieur Antoine.

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The upper floor would probably have been used for fashionable games, especially in inclement weather, and the design included spiral staircases and viewing galleries.

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Decline

 

George Trenchard, builder of the Riding House, died substantially in debt in 1610. 

 

The victory of Puritanical Parliamentarian forces in the English Civil War in 1646 meant that the Riding House could no longer be used for amusements and it became a barn used for agricultural storage.

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The solid construction and sizeable dimensions clearly made the building of value since we know from the ​Historic England scientific survey referred to above that the building was reroofed using English oak felled in the Spring of 1720 and Winter of 1721-22.

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​The Trenchards fell on hard times and so did Wolfeton House, being let as a farmhouse in the late 18th century. By then it was owned by the Hennings who had been both cousins and lawyers to the Trenchards. In the middle of the 19th century, they sold it on to yet more cousins, the Westons.  The next owner was also a kinsman of the Westons, Albert Bankes, a younger son of the Kingston Lacy Bankeses. He died in 1913, but his wife, Florence, lived on at Wolfeton until 1947.

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The ownership of the Riding House passed with Wolfeton Farm which had been sold and it subsequently slowly deteriorated in its tranquil and secluded location.

 

Even in the mid-20th Century, its importance was unrecognised, being listed by Historic England on 26 January 1956 as 'Wolfeton Barn'. 

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However, research by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England led to an exciting discovery.

 

In The Buildings of England, Dorset , Nikolaus Pevsner and John Newman write (page 147): The Riding House is one of the most exciting discoveries by the R.C.H.M. in the county….the earliest surviving riding school in England … identified as such by its similarities with two Smythson drawings, the plan of Prince Henry’s riding school at St James’s Palace, built c. 1604, and the elevation for the riding school at Welbeck Abbey.

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Fall (almost)

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Nonetheless, such was the parlous state of the building by the early 1990s that the owner who farmed at Wolfeton proposed to demolish the building. 

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Captain Nigel Thimbleby, a distant relation of the Trenchards, whose family had acquired Wolfeton House in 1947 recognised the importance of the building.  In an imaginative and generous  act almost stranger than fiction, Captain Thimbleby bought the Riding House and its grounds for £1 and donated them to the newly-created Trust with the aim of repairing and conserving it for the benefit of future generations.

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