Greys Court has been home to powerful families for nearly a thousand years, Beginning with the medieval de Greys and the Tudor courtier Sir Francis Knollys. In the 18th century it belonged to the Stapletons, whose fortune came from the enslavement of people on Caribbean plantations, though they made few changes to the house. Finally, the Brunner family created a comfortable home here in 1937, and today visitors can enjoy the surviving parts of the Tudor house, romantic ruins and beautiful gardens that reflect its long and varied history.

The property is owned by the National Trust, and excavations have been ongoing on this ancient and very complex site. This year, the excavation focused on investigating a lost inter-court range that formerly linked the buildings on the east and west sides of the property’s courtyard. Aerial photographs, seasonal parch-marks on the oval lawn and the results of a geophysical survey were used to determine where to excavate. Buried for more than 300 years, objects including roof and floor tiles, fragments of pottery, animal bone and glass, including fragments which indicated the windows had been glazed, were uncovered.