Abbey House Gardens

[1] The Tudor house was built on top of a substantial late 13th century undercroft which was part of the abbey buildings.

The Tudor design of the house followed a characteristic half-H-shaped plan, with two protruding gabled bays at each end of the front elevation.

He gave a large part of the Abbey to the town as a parish church and reserved much of the rest of the site as the setting for a family home.

[4] By the early 1600s Abbey House was part of a large portfolio of property in the town known as the manor of Malmesbury.

[5] The lordship of the manor, and ownership of Abbey House, belonged in the early seventeenth century to the Danvers family.

One of Devereux's senior officers, Marmaduke Pudsey, fell in love with Mary Ivie and, despite their political differences, they were married at Malmesbury Abbey on 30 September 1644.

The writer John Aubrey knew Stumpe and recounted his adventures in South America in his book The Natural History of Wiltshire.

[6] They decided to extend the property and rebuilt the eastern end of the building, employing the architect Harold Brakspear.

In 1968, Eva Mackirdy sold Abbey House to a group of Anglican nuns who were members of the Community of St Andrew.

In 1994, Abbey House was bought by Ian and Barbara Pollard, who had previously owned Hazelbury Manor, another mansion near Box in Wiltshire.

[6] In the front of the house, on a flat area of two acres, he established a series of formal 'garden rooms', demarcated by box and yew hedges, with topiary, herbaceous borders and trained apples and pears.

Hedges traced the outline of the abbey's Lady Chapel which extended into this part of the garden in the Middle Ages.

[8] In November 2021 Barbara Pollard sold Abbey House to Whit and Kim Hanks, who in March of that year had bought the nearby Old Bell Hotel.

[10] The ambition of Whit and Kim Hanks over the period 2022–2024 is "to lovingly restore the house into a luxury hotel subject to receiving permissions".

During the 2022 summer season the gardens were opened to the public six times, from May to October on the second Saturday of each month, and the proceeds from the sale of tickets were given to Malmesbury Carnival for distribution to local charities.