Upton Grey

The village is on the line of an ancient Roman road, the Chichester to Silchester Way.

The Grey derives from the years when the village was owned by the de Grey family and was used to differentiate the village from the many other Uptons.

The Manor House dates from Elizabethan times when the Matthew family lived there. The famous Elizabethan poet, George Puttenham, lived at Herriard House but also had a farm at Upton Grey. It was there that he kept his seventeen-year-old sex slave whom he had kidnapped in London. Eventually she was released when Puttenham's long suffering wife discovered her existence.[2]

Charles Holme purchased several houses and a great deal of the surrounding land in Upton Grey. The Old Manor House, which he rented to tenants for the rest of his life, was in fragile condition. Holme then commissioned a local architect Ernest Newton to refurbish it, keeping many of the original timbers. Today's Edwardian decoration encloses oak rooms, a 16th-century staircase and original roof timbers. Newton's house was finished in 1907. Gertrude Jekyll created a four and a half acre garden around it.

Hoddington House is a Grade II* Listed mansion built around 1700 by John Limbrey. Described by Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘by far the best house’ in Upton Grey, it is built on the site of a religious house called Edyndon, a monastery affiliated to the Abbey of Beaulieu in the New Forest.[3] It was the childhood home of George Sclater-Booth, 1st Baron Basing and his brother, the naturalist Philip Sclater.

Monuments in St Mary's, Church include an alabaster wall monument to Dorothy Bulstrode, Lady Eyre (1592-1650), a lady in waiting to Anne of Denmark, with her portrait bust and heraldry.[4]