Qualla: Donington le Heath Manor House

Donington le Heath Manor House: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tree-ring dating is an unsentimental science. It looks at oak beams, counts growth rings, matches them against a regional master sequence, and produces a date the timber was felled. The beams in the roof of Donington le Heath gave up their secret some years ago: most of them were cut between 1288 and 1295. Which means that when you stand in the upper rooms of this modest sandstone-and-granite manor house in rural Leicestershire, you are standing inside woodwork that was already in place when Edward I was on the English throne. The house has survived the Black Death, the Reformation, the Gunpowder Plot, two civil wars, several centuries as a working tenant farm, a stint as a pig farm, and the determined attentions of Leicestershire County Council, which bought it in 1965 when it was very close to being lost.

Donington le Heath Manor House: Seven Centuries on the Same Foundation

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The house was probably built by Robert and Isabella de Herle, tenants of nearby Charley Priory in the late thirteenth century. From the 1530s until 1627 the site belonged to the Digby family, whose main seat lay at Tilton on the Hill but whose holdings spread across Leicestershir...

Donington le Heath Manor House: A Recusant Catholic Family in Protestant England

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Digbys are the reason this house carries more historical weight than its size would suggest. John Digby of Seaton, who owned Donington in the early 1600s, was a known recusant Catholic - that is, someone who refused to attend Church of England services in an era when that ref...

Donington le Heath Manor House: King Dick's Bed and Other Furniture Stories

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2016 refurbishment furnished the house as a Catholic Digby family home of the 1620s might have looked, with a generous mixture of original and replica pieces that visitors are invited to touch and use. Almost everything is for handling. The one exception sits in an upstairs c...

Donington le Heath Manor House: The Tenant Farm Centuries

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From 1670 to 1960, the manor was rented out as a working farm, with proceeds going to support a hospital and orphanage in nearby Osgathorpe. Two hundred and ninety years of agricultural labour is the largest single chapter of the building's life, and it explains the modesty of th...