country house hotel gardens

It could be straight out of Jane Austen novel – the winding treelined drive, the crunch of gravel under foot as one navigates the carriage circle in front of a stately façade. The architecture blends 17th century Jacobean and Victorian Gothic features of red brickwork, octagonal turrets and finished-off by a duo of mythical stone griffons perched on the roof. 

The Priory Wareham was the final stop on our Porsche Cayenne GTS tour of Devon and Cornwall, and if you're going to end a drive through some of England's finest countryside, ending it beside the River Frome with a 16th-century monastery waiting at the door is doing it properly.