The village street at Badminton is a charming architectural set piece, redolent of benevolent feudalism. It forms a wide, straight, east-west axis focused on the 19th-century gates of the ‘Big House’ and is lined with ochre-washed terraces, cottages, as well as some larger houses mainly dating from the reign of Queen Anne. There are muscular rubble, and barge-boarded Victorian model dwellings too, designed by Tait, the estate surveyor, in about 1860, to add a little grit to the oyster.

At the east end before the lamp-flanked gates, the street widens into an informal square with a grass rondel and a handsome hybrid plane tree planted 50 years ago as a present by the Countess of Westmorland. This is over-looked from the north by the estate office, which looks like a Georgian coaching inn, a

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