About & History
A Domesday farmstead with over a thousand years of recorded history.
Restoration of traditional farm buildings underway
Owner-occupied, working with purpose
Stenbury Manor Farm is a c.200 hectare owner-occupied livestock estate set in the southern Isle of Wight, between Godshill and Niton. The holding lies within the Isle of Wight National Landscape and comprises large open permanent pasture fields broken up by pockets of ancient woodland, copses, and historic hedgerows.
Ian and Claire Wellby bought the estate from English Heritage in 2017 and have since undertaken a comprehensive programme of restoration — to the manor house, the home farmhouse "Newbarn Farm" as well as many traditional Island Stone farm buildings. Equally, significant investment has been made into the farming enterprise, with thousands of metres of fencing, hedging and water infrastructure installed in the last few years. The philosophy throughout has been to combine a productive working farm with an active and long-term commitment to conservation.
Over a thousand years of recorded history
Few Island estates can trace their history as far back as Stenbury. The first mention dates to 661 AD — though perhaps apocryphal — when Edith of Stenbury is said to have leapt before Wulfhere, King of Mercia, begging him to spare a local lord's life as he sought to convert the last pagan corner of England to Christianity. It is a fine tale.
On firmer ground, Stenbury appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, held by the Saxon lord Cheping — one of countless who lost everything after the Norman Conquest. By 1200 it had passed to the de Heyno family, who held it for nearly three centuries.
The most celebrated episode of the de Heyno era came in 1377, when the French landed on the northern shore and laid siege to Carisbrooke Castle. Peter de Heyno, having observed the French commander's daily movements, shot him with his silver bow through an arrow slit still known today as 'de Heyno's loop'.
The last Lord of Stenbury, Thomas de Heyno, died in 1506 leaving seven daughters but no sons. Within eighty years the Manor had been absorbed into the Worsley family's Appuldurcombe estate. The present house was most likely built during the Legge family's occupation in the early 1600s. In the 18th century James Worsley extended it, and received the famous — if unenthusiastic — visit of the historian Edward Gibbon.
"I have passed four or five days at Stenbury rather quietly than agreeably."
Edward Gibbon, historian of Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireStenbury then passed to the Yarborough Estate, and latterly to the Russell family who held it from 1939 until Audrey Russell died in 2014, bequeathing it to English Heritage. The house was in a sorry state upon Ian and Claire's purchase — it had never had central heating or much plumbing installed — and they have spent the years since undertaking a complete restoration.
De Heyno's Loop — the arrow slit in the west wall of Carisbrooke Castle through which Peter de Heyno shot the French commander in 1377
Stenbury Manor House — from Percy Stone, The Architectural Antiquities of the Isle of Wight, Vol I, London 1891