Bishopstrow House


Bishopstrow House, currently occupied by the Bishopstrow House Hotel, is a late-Georgian English country house standing near the B3414 in the parish of Bishopstrow, about a mile east of Warminster, Wiltshire.

History

A manor house was built at Bishopstrow in the late 18th century, between the Salisbury road and the River Wylye, but this was destroyed by fire in 1817. The present-day house was then begun on the north side of the road, nearer to the escarpment of Salisbury Plain, and was completed by John Pinch the elder in 1821. The gardens of the earlier house were retained and are linked to the new site by a tunnel under the road.
In 1950 the house was bought by W. Keith Neal, a firearms collector, and in 1976 it was purchased by Kurt Schiller, who the next year turned it into a ten-bedroom hotel. It has since been extended to provide more rooms. In 1988 the hotel was bought by the Blandy family, owners of the five-star Reid's Hotel and winery in Madeira. In 1995 it was again sold; in 2001 it became part of the Von Essen hotels group, and in 2011 part of the Longleat Hotel Group. In 2018, the hotel was bought by Frank Mountain's Versant Developments.
The house is set in grounds of some twenty-seven acres. As of 2001 it had twenty-four double bedrooms, six suites, and two family rooms. The River Wylye runs through the grounds, and a summerhouse and a boathouse stand alongside it. The grounds also contain two ancient burial mounds: a long barrow and a bowl barrow.