Twenty-six suits of armour
Japanese samurai armour from the 17th and 19th centuries lined up in one room — the collection's signature sight.
Celuici — CC0 · Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). — CC BY-SA 4.0
Let nothing perish was the motto of Charles Paget Wade, the architect-craftsman who bought this sixteenth-century Cotswold-stone house in the hilltop village of Snowshill in 1919 and then filled it with more than 22,000 objects until there was no room left for himself. He slept instead in the small Priest's House next door, and handed the manor to the National Trust in 1951 exactly as it stood. What you get, then, is not a stately home but a cabinet of curiosities at full scale: twenty-six suits of Japanese samurai armour drawn up in a single room like a silent guard, and around them clocks, bicycles, musical instruments, toys, spinning wheels and model ships stacked floor to ceiling. Wade refused to have electricity installed, so the rooms are deliberately dim and lit by daylight alone — lovely to stand in, punishing for a camera. Do not count on good photographs indoors. The garden would justify the drive on its own. Wade laid it out with the architect M. H. Baillie Scott between 1920 and 1923 as a run of stepped terraces treated as outdoor rooms, each with its own wall, gate and mood, plus a pond, a dovecote, the model Cornish harbour he called Wolf's Cove, and woodwork painted the particular blue-green now known as Wade blue. May and June are its best weeks. Practically, this is a day trip from the Cotswolds: about 5 km south of Broadway, ten minutes by car along narrow lanes, with a free car park. From there it is a walk of some 500 yards down to the house, and there is no way around it — the return leg is uphill. You pay at reception on the day; there is no advance booking, entry to the house is given a set time when it is busy, and last admission to the manor is 3.30pm, so arrive before midday in July and August. The season runs from about mid-March to the end of October, then weekends only in November, and the place shuts for the winter. Come expecting grandeur and you will leave puzzled; come for the strange and you will leave delighted, and children are usually in the second camp.
Japanese samurai armour from the 17th and 19th centuries lined up in one room — the collection's signature sight.
Wade refused to wire the house, so it is seen by daylight alone and feels closer to a stage set than a museum.
Stepped Arts and Crafts terraces by Wade and Baillie Scott, in their distinctive Wade blue, with his model harbour village, Wolf's Cove.
Snowshill, near Broadway, Gloucestershire WR12 7JU
Usually worth it: the armour, the bicycles, the toys and the model village hold children better than most furnished mansions. Two caveats, though — it is a 500-yard walk down from the car park and back up again, and inside there are stairs, narrow passages and dim rooms crammed with objects, so a carrier beats a pushchair. There is nothing interactive and no screens; the pleasure is purely visual.
No, and it is not trying to. Snowshill is not an aristocratic house of state rooms and marble staircases; it is one man's hoard, arranged as he left it. If you only have room for one palace and you want grandeur, go to Blenheim. But if you are staying in the Cotswolds for a week and the honey-stone villages have started to blur, Snowshill is the morning you will remember.