Ferne House

Ferne House is a country house in the parish of Donhead St Andrew in Wiltshire, England. There has been a settlement on the site since 1225 AD. The current house, known as Ferne Park and the third to occupy the site, was designed by architect Quinlan Terry in 2001. The estate grounds straddle both Donhead St Andrew and Berwick St John parishes.

Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age artefacts were found in the vicinity of the house during 1988 archaeological fieldwork.

The first Ferne House was the manor house of the de Ferne family: Philip de Ferne is recorded as living there in 1225. From the Ferne family, it passed to the Brookway family, and in 1561 to William Grove of Shaftesbury. By 1809 the house had become so dilapidated that it was demolished.

The second Ferne House was built by Thomas Grove, "on an enlarged scale in the year 1811 on the site of the old structure … in an elevated situation, commanding a pleasing view of the surrounding country". An 1850 photograph of this house is reproduced in The Grove Diaries.

This house was remodelled some time after 1850 and assumed a square ground-plan. In 1902 the house passed out of the ownership of the Grove family, when it was sold to A. H. Charlesworth, who further enlarged it the following year.

The house was bought in 1914 by Alfred Douglas-Hamilton, 13th Duke of Hamilton, who also bought nearby Ashcombe House at around the same time. During World War II the house was used as an animal sanctuary by his wife Nina, co-founder in 1906 of the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society with Lizzy Lind af Hageby. She used the sanctuary to enable well-off London families to evacuate their pets to safety. The house remained in the Hamilton family’s possession until the estate was bequeathed by the Duchess to the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, for the purpose of maintaining the sanctuary. Nikolaus Pevsner described the house in his 1963 edition of Wiltshire in The Buildings of England series (incorrectly ascribed by him to the parish of Berwick St John).

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