Chastleton is a place which has always had a greater store of myths than money. Walter Jones set the precedent by fabricating a grander ancestry for himself, his family having become rich through success in the booming cloth trade.
In its sophisticated architecture, its lavish interiors and its advanced garden layout, Chastleton was meant to demonstrate how far its owner had climbed he social hierarchy.
Yet Walter’s heirs never rose above the status of county gentry, maybe because of their commitment to lost causes: they were Royalists then Jacobites.
Family legend goes that Irene Whitmore Jones, owner of Chastleton in the 1930s and 1940s, was fond of telling visitors in the late 40s that her family had lost all their money ‘in the war’ – by which she meant not the recent world war but the Civil War 300 years earlier!