Davill Court, near Woolfont Magna, Wiltshire

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Davill Court is a Grade II-listed late-16th-century manor house (with a minor Caroline extension), with surrounding park and agricultural estate, located in the countryside near to Woolfont Magna in Wiltshire. It is the seat of the Douty baronets of Davil Court (thus in the patent), currently represented by Sir Thomas Douty, third baronet.

It is named for the Dapple Brook which runs through it, and thence through Woolfont Magna.

History
Originally a holding of the Abbey at Wolfdown Abbas, it was acquired at the Dissolution, in lieu, apparently, of a professional fee, by Henry Douty, attorney to the Malets. Henry Douty (or Dutty, or Doughtie) was the grandson of a Lancastrian judge who was in turn the grandson of a villein family in Senfield, on the borders of the Downlands and the Vale: the family’s rise to prominence, through service to the Trulocks, who had held as knights from the Malets, and then through service to the Malets and the Abbey both, had been canny, but not always pretty; and it may have been the better part of valour for Harry Douty to mark his prominence with an estate as far removed from Senfield as he might manage.

By 1553, he had transformed the former monastic guest-house of the 14th Century into a sophisticated Tudor country manor house; and, excepting discreet modernisations of plumbing and wiring, it remains remarkably unchanged today.

Its gardens, hothouse, and orangery are also listed (Grade II*); they include an Elizabethan walled garden, and gardens designed by Gertrude Jekyll in 1913, who was engaged in a major reorganisation of the Wolfdown gardens at the time for the eighth Duke of Taunton.