Ashburnham Place

Ashburnham Place is an English country house, now used as a Christian conference and prayer centre, five miles west of Battle, East Sussex.

The house was largely rebuilt to designs of the neo-Palladian architect Stephen Wright[2] and the local direction of the builder John Morris of Lewes, ca 1757–61.

[3] The park, covering some 200 acres (0.81 km2) and including three large lakes around the house, was laid out by the landscape architect Capability Brown in the mid-18th century.

[8] By the late 19th century, the family was under financial pressure, and offered to sell the library, including its collection of illuminated manuscripts, to the nation in the 1890s for £160,000.

The house was damaged when a fully loaded Marauder bomber crashed nearby during the Second World War, and dry rot set in.

[10] Lady Catherine was the last of this line of the Ashburnham family and the estate was inherited by Reverend John David Bickersteth (1926-1991), a great-grandson of the 4th Earl, on her death in 1953.