Venues in The Cotswolds
Honey-stone villages from Chipping Norton and Burford to the Gloucestershire hills: manors, estates and country houses let whole, west of Oxford.
THE PIG in the Cotswolds
The Cotswolds — Hotel
The former Barnsley House, a 17th-century Cotswold manor in Rosemary Verey's gardens, reopened by THE PIG in 2024 with a skylit private dining room and a panelled snug.
Ellenborough Park
The Cotswolds — Hotel
Up to 140 guests
A 15th-century Cotswold manor house on 90 acres above Cheltenham, let whole for weddings and celebrations, with a glass-roofed suite for 120 and panelled dining rooms.
Buckland Manor
The Cotswolds — Hotel
Up to 45 guests
A 13th-century manor house near Broadway with ten acres of gardens and 15 rooms, let whole for house parties and celebrations of up to 45.
The Painswick
The Cotswolds — Hotel
Up to 80 guests
An 18th-century Palladian house in a Cotswold hill village, let whole for 24 or 48 hours with 17 bedrooms, a cottage and a valley-view terrace for up to 80.
The Slaughters Manor House
The Cotswolds — Hotel
Up to 120 guests
A 17th-century manor in Lower Slaughter, let whole for up to 120 guests, with five acres of gardens, a panelled restaurant for 86 and a Pink Lounge for 22.
Cowley Manor Experimental
The Cotswolds — Hotel
Up to 150 guests
An Italianate Cotswolds manor above a lake, redesigned by Dorothée Meilichzon and let whole with all 36 bedrooms for weddings, launches and birthdays.
Blenheim Palace
The Cotswolds — Estate
Up to 2,000 guests
The Dukes of Marlborough's baroque palace near Woodstock, where the Long Library seats 250 and the parkland takes marquees for much larger events.
Badminton House
The Cotswolds — Estate
Up to 300 guests
The Duke of Beaufort's seat lets its West Wing, with Gibbs's North Hall seating 80 beneath Wootton's paintings, plus Kent's Worcester Lodge across the park.
Estelle Manor
The Cotswolds — Hotel
Up to 100 guests
A Jacobean-style country house and members' club near Eynsham, with a vaulted events hall, a malachite-green Chinese dining room and a walled-garden glasshouse for private occasions.
Thyme
The Cotswolds — Hotel
Up to 60 guests
A restored Cotswold manor farm with 31 bedrooms, a MICHELIN Guide restaurant in an old ox barn, and a 16th-century Tithe Barn for private dinners of up to 60.
Dormy House Hotel & Spa
The Cotswolds — Hotel
Up to 150 guests
A 17th-century Cotswold farmhouse hotel above Broadway with 39 bedrooms, let whole for house parties of up to 150.
/ About The Cotswolds▾
The Cotswolds take their character from the Jurassic limestone beneath them, a stone running from warm honey to cool grey, found in the dry stone walls, the merchants’ houses and the wool churches of the market towns. The hills rise westward from the upper Thames and crest in an escarpment above the Severn valley. Designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1966 and covering 790 square miles, the Cotswolds National Landscape is the largest in the UK. Near Oxford stands Blenheim Palace, built between 1705 and 1722 as the nation’s gift to the first Duke of Marlborough and a World Heritage Site since 1987.
The hire product is the house itself: a manor, a former rectory or a farmhouse estate let whole for a weekend, or a country-house hotel sold on exclusive use. A private house brings the caterer and staff in from outside and agrees the schedule around the household; a hotel keeps its kitchen, dining room and bedrooms. Numbers are set by the rooms and the grounds rather than a ballroom figure. A dinner stays inside, and a larger party goes into a marquee on the lawn, which puts power, access and parking into the first conversation.
Direct Great Western Railway trains run from London Paddington on the Cotswold Line to Kingham, around an hour and a half away, and on to Moreton-in-Marsh. The last train back leaves Kingham shortly before midnight, which makes a same-night return possible but tight once dinner runs late. By road the route is the M40 past Oxford. Most of the area sits beyond the practical limit for an evening that ends in London, so the occasion is usually a weekend, with guests staying in the house or nearby and a coach from a single pick-up.