Summer Visit
Our Summer Visit in 2024 is to Cobham Hall near Rochester on 11th July. The cost is £15 per person, which includes afternoon tea. We will share cars to drive to Cobham Hall and have a guided tour led by Cristoph Bull who is a well-known local historian and will also be speaking to us about Pocahontas in September. The tour is of the house only and does not include the Mausoleum which is owned by the National Trust.
If you are interested in going on the trip, please contact Steve McArragher (01622 831007 steve.mcarragher@btinternet.com) or Carol Hogg (01622 832900 carol.hogg@hotmail.com)
| Cobham Hall in 1868 | Cobham Hall Now |
| Cobham Hall is a historic country house with roots in the 12th century. Even earlier than that there was a Roman villa here, but it was in 1208 that the history of Cobham Hall really started. In that year Henry de Cobham, later the 1st Lord Cobham, is known to have inhabited an early manor house on the site. The house was extended in the Tudor period, and Elizabeth I was known to have visited Sir William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham, here in 1559. Sir William added the first of the wings which are so much a part of the Cobham design. The Brooke family was implicated in the plot to put Arabella Stuart on the throne in place of James I, so the latter seized the estate and granted it to his cousin, Ludowick Stuart, 2nd Duke of Lennox. In 1625 James’s son Charles, later Charles I, spent his honeymoon night at Cobham with his new queen, Henrietta Maria. In the 18th century, the Hall passed to the Bligh family, later Earls of Darnley who built the distinctive Mausoleum at Cobham. Alterations were made by Sir William Chambers, (1767–70) The most notable feature of the interior is the two-storey Gilt Hall, c, 1770–81. The fourth earl of Darnley, who inherited in 1781, employed architect James Wyatt and landscape designer Humphry Repton was hired to draw up a plan for the estate and two of his sons designed features of the building. Many English monarchs have enjoyed the splendour of Cobham Hall from Elizabeth I to Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor. Charles Dickens regularly walked through the grounds from his house in Higham to the Leather Bottle pub in Cobham village. In 1883 the Honourable Ivo Bligh, later the 8th Earl of Darnley, led the victorious English cricket team against Australia and brought home the “”Ashes”” to Cobham Hall. Cobham Hall was converted into a military hospital in WWI, and a home for RAF officers in WWII. The Darnley family finally left the Hall in 1957, and in 1962 Cobham was converted into a school for girls, a role it still fulfils. | |