1620s House

The 1620s House and Garden, at Donington le Heath in Leicestershire, is a rare surviving manor house rebuilt around 1290 by the lawyer Robert de Herle. The Digby family held the property for more than two hundred years from the fifteenth century onwards, and the house has a documented connection to Sir Everard Digby, a relative of the family who took part in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In 1618 the Digbys modernised the building, adding mullioned windows and a new roof, work that gives the house much of its present external appearance. The building is now presented furnished in an early seventeenth-century style, reflecting this phase of its long history as a family home.