Shropshire Magazine

An annual rock concert is a popular fundraiser at this south Shropshire house

Chris and Sarah Woodward have developed various entrepreneurial means of making Hopton Court pay its way

Tucked away in its picturesque landscape park outside the village of Hopton Wafers on the south Shropshire borderlands, Hopton Court is, in many senses, a monument to industry.

Within its gently undulating parkland, with sylvan clumps and the odd specimen tree, the lofty pedimented and stuccoed house perched upon its terrace, looking down upon a lake, appears the epitome of calm assurance.

Yet, like so many country houses, Hopton hides an ingenious set of enterprises which go towards sustaining the property.

Take, for instance, the weekend of 13th and 14th July this year, when Hopton’s walled garden played host to Suzi Quatro during what has become an important part of the county’s annual music calendar.

The Hole in the Wall Concerts are now going into their 10th year, with 11 concerts held over the last nine years.

The brainchild of Hopton’s owner, Chris Woodward, a self-confessed “old rocker”, the Hole in the Wall venture succeeded the Hopton Court horse trials which eventually ceased in the aftermath of the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease troubles.

For Chris and his wife Sarah, the concerts are just as much a hands-on exercise as the running of Hopton itself, with Chris actively seeking out many of the acts that perform and overseeing proceedings during the concerts themselves.

Events such as these, as elsewhere, don’t just help the host-house but also feed into the local economy by bringing people into the area to stay at local hotels or B&Bs and sustain themselves at local shops and businesses.

Where the Hole in the Wall Concerts are concerned, this brings an average of 2,000 people to Hopton, a number which this year was reduced to about 1,500 on account of the weather’s inclemency.

The central staircase hall

The concerts are, of course, just one weekend out of Hopton’s and the Woodwards’ calendar, and the time not spent in making arrangements for that one special weekend is spent in various other endeavours such as running Hopton Wines, a wine merchant enterprise, and in playing host to weddings.

A dozen or more couples tie the knot at Hopton each year, with the ceremony taking place in the unusual early-19th-century conservatory of curved cast iron, and the reception being held in the smartly converted coach house.

The conservatory, which now glistens with fresh white paint and sparkling glass on the lawn to the south-east of the house, was conserved as part of an English Heritage partnership project about 12 years ago.

Prior to that, photographs show an ungainly cat’s cradle of rusting iron propped against the wall, which did little to enhance the view from the house nor, indeed, to honour the history of the place.

Iron was quite literally at the core of Hopton’s existence in the early years of the 19th century, when the estate was owned by the Woodwards’ forebears, the Botfield family.

The Botfields, in the opening years of that century, centred on three brothers - the sons of Thomas Botfield the elder (d1801) who had established the family fortune with the Lightmoor Ironworks and iron- and coal-mining interests at Old Park, in the Clee Hills, and with satellite mines in Staffordshire and in Flintshire. At Old Park, the Botfield ironworks was, by 1806, the largest in Shropshire and the second largest in Britain.

Of the Botfield sons, Beriah inherited Norton in Northamptonshire, William acquired Decker Hill (see The Shropshire Magazine August 2007), while Thomas (d1843) came to Hopton.

The magnificent conservatory

Industry and agriculture had rubbed shoulders at the rural estate before the arrival of the Botfields, since blade mills had existed there in the early 18th century when the property was owned by the Hydes, a family who had been settled at Hopton since the time of Richard Hyde (d1604).

The blade mill was later converted to a paper mill and was the unhappy scene of the accidental death of a Mrs Sarah Hyde who, accompanying her husband Richard to view the works, tragically fell into the machinery.

A daughter, Mary Hyde, sold the property to Joseph Oldham, a Nottinghamshire-born hop merchant from Bewdley. Oldham, who also owned the manor of Caynham, in 1770 demolished the existing house at Hopton and built a new house on a new site which, in turn, was sold to John Hale of Bewdley in 1779.

Just four years later, he was succeeded by his nephew Curteis Hale and it was Curteis who, in 1798, sold Hopton on to Thomas Botfield.

Botfield maintained the paper mill at Hopton and with his wife, Lucy Skelhorne, he was responsible for rebuilding the parish church of St Michael in 1825-7 and also for the establishment of a Free School.

For their own home, the Botfields commissioned John Nash to effect a rebuilding in 1811, and it is said that at the same time they sought the advice of Nash’s one-time partner, Humphry Repton, to undertake the landscaping of the park.

The house prior to Nash’s alterations for Thomas Botfield

Sadly Nash’s plans and Repton’s proposals - which may have been illustrated in watercolour in one of his celebrated Red Books - have not, as yet, come to light and the attribution to these arbiters of taste rests upon reference in Stemmata Botevilliana, a compendium of family history compiled by the Botfield’s nephew, Beriah Botfield, in 1858. Repton’s works were there described as making the park become “adapted to the course of the dingle, and by the means of walks all its parts are easily accessible”.

Nash’s work had given the option of a castellated gothic scheme, although in the end the Botfields chose a more serious classical fenestration for the house.

This appears , to have included the suave single-storey Ionic colonnade on the west front and the balustraded bays and porch on the south elevation, together with the addition of a pedimented top floor upon the house.

Nash’s internal plan is an absolute joy with wonderfully proportioned rooms that are well placed to enjoy the house’s elevated position and to offer good views to south and west.

The entrance vestibule leads into a central staircase hall from which open the octagonal dining room, columned drawing room and apsidal-ended library, which retains its Gillows cases.

Filled with light, the rooms’ windows link the house with the landscape around it and, in the case of the drawing room, a felled cedar tree from the garden has found an internal home in the form of a recently made desk.

Servants at Hopton in Victorian times

In the Botfields’ time, the house and its landscape setting were justly admired, not least by the garden designer and writer John Claudius Loudon who wrote admiringly of the house’s internal proportions and of its relationship with the landscape.

Thomas Botfield died in 1843 and is commemorated not only by a handsome monument within the church but also by a giant sarcophagus in the churchyard.

His widow, Lucy, remained at the Court until her own death in 1856 when their nephew, Beriah Botfield, inherited a life interest which came to an end at his death in 1863. Hopton Court then passed to the Rev Woodward, whose mother, Sarah, had been the sister of Lucy Botfield (nee Skelhorne).

It has been with the Woodwards, who originally hailed from Lancashire, ever since. Chris’s great-grandfather, Admiral Robert Woodward, chose to let the house and in the First World War it was occupied by a Mr Tomkinson, a carpet manufacturer.

In the 20th century though, the future of the house was under threat when Chris’s own father vacated the place and even considered selling the house.

It was at that time that Chris took up the reins of Hopton Court, demolishing part of the service wing to make the house more manageable, moving in and beginning the entrepreneurial endeavours which seek to make the place pay.

Concerts, weddings and wine are a world apart from coal mining, iron founding and paper making, but they have in essence the same objective of making the eminently civilised and hospitable house of Hopton pay its own way.

For further information about Hopton Wines, the Hole in the Wall and Hopton Court as a venue go to www.hoptoncourt.co.uk