Beaulieu Palace House

Beaulieu Palace House is a 13th-century manor in Hampshire's New Forest, built around the surviving conventual buildings of Beaulieu Abbey. When Henry VIII dissolved the English monasteries, Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton, purchased the estate in 1538, and it has remained in his descendants' hands — the Barons Montagu of Beaulieu — ever since, one of the longest unbroken private ownerships in England. Medieval vaulting and stonework from the original abbey are still visible within the house, layered beneath centuries of country-house adaptation. Visitors today can tour the interiors, wander the gardens, and combine the visit with the adjacent National Motor Museum on the same estate.