Cliveden

Cliveden is an Italianate country house and estate perched forty metres above the Thames on a wooded clifftop near Taplow in Buckinghamshire. The present house was designed in 1851 by Charles Barry, architect of the Palace of Westminster, for the Duke of Sutherland after two earlier buildings burned down. It later belonged to the Astor family and became notorious in the 1960s as the setting of the Profumo affair, a sex-and-spying scandal that toppled members of the British government. The National Trust now cares for the formal gardens with their parterres, Long Garden topiary and water terrace, while the house itself is leased as a luxury hotel. Visitors wander avenues, hedge mazes and viewing alleys laid out above the river valley.