Swifts Park

Swifts Park is a former country estate and manor house 1 mile (1.6 km) north-east of the town of Cranbrook in the English county of Kent.

Tooth lost money in the Overend, Gurney and Company bank crash of 1866, and died in 1871 after which his family were forced the sell the property which now covered around 158 hectares (390 acres).

It was the birthplace of Lieutenant Boyd Alexander, author of From The Niger To The Nile, for which he received the Founder's Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 1907 before being killed whilst exploring near Lake Chad in 1910.

[5] The house, with 18 bedrooms and "nearly 417 acres (169 ha)" of estate,[6] was brought by Major Victor Cazalet, Conservative MP for Chippenham, in 1936.

As a young child the actress Elizabeth Taylor, who was Cazalet's goddaughter, spent weekends and summer holidays on the estate in the years before World War II.

[16] The final recorded match on the ground came in July 1863 when an amateur Gentlemen of Kent side played a South Wales Cricket Club team.