Bletchley Manor has only very recently been revealed as a Tudor timber-framed house of significance. For the last hundred years or so it had been hiding beneath the guise of a nineteenth-century painted ‘black-and-white’ façade.

Dendrochronological dating has revealed a consistency of timbers used in the construction of the house – with two perlins and one principal rafter having come from the same tree – and with felling dates of trees dating from the late spring and early summer of 1594. The late sixteenth-century work, though, was on an old site; Bletchley having been included in the fourteenth-century Domesday survey – albeit treated as a part of nearby Moreton Saye. At an earlier date there was quite conceivably a fortified settlement on the property, since old field maps show the paddock before the Manor as ‘Castle Field’ and the inn on the main road was also known as The Old Castle whilst the nearby stream is known as the ‘Bailey Brook’ – these names harkening back to the significance of the site.

Inside the front door, the hall has an early Georgian ramped staircase, with baluster-turned spindles and a square newel, ascending the back wall, while to the left is an oak-panelled parlour. On the first floor,the house retains painted early seventeenth-century panelling to one of the bedrooms.

The late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century build of the present house owes to Rowland Hill (1558– 1639) of Soulton (q.v.) who was married to Margaret, the daughter of William Forster or Forester of Upton Magna. Hill had been leasing the house but, in 1587, purchased it from Sir Richard Corbet of Moreton Corbet (q.v.) for £350. It was settled on his son and namesake, Rowland Hill (1601–1667), in 1622 and so might have been built by the father as an heir-inwaiting’s house. Rowland Hill senior’s involvement in alterations at the property is commemorated in a fragile heraldic relic in the form of a glass quarry, painted with the arms of Hill impaled with Forster and the date 1639.