Malwood

Master keeper's lodge for Castle Malwood walk, 'extended' by Sir William Harcourt (1827-1904), Liberal politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who obtained the site on a 99-year building lease. Although Harcourt's widow and then their son were later listed as living there, before it was sold in 1921 it was rented to, among others, Baron Welby, civil servant and politician, who died there.1791 - Gilpin mentions Mr Samber of castle-Malwood lodge, whose son Capt. Samber of the navy, obligingly put into my hands other useful papers [on the subject of the present state of New-forest], which had belonged to his father.Hutchinson, p. 94-5: ‘the king [Rufus] impiously disregarded the warning [of the fate that would befall him if he persisted in hunting on the morrow], after a night chiefly spent in revelry at Malwood Castle hard by’.Cornish, p. 56. ‘Malwood, where stood the house in which Rufus lay the night before his death, and where till the present generation, the keeper of Malwood Walk had his lodge, is the eastern buttress of this High Stony-Cross Ridge. Sir William Vernon Harcourt’s beautiful house now stands on the site; long, low, timbered and gabled, it is perhaps the most pleasing of the many new mansions which now stand on sites leased from the Crown on the ground once occupied by the old lodges.’Pevsner, p. 829 Addendum: Malwood, 1/4 m. NE of Castle Malwood, was designed in a vaguely Shaw style, 1883-4 by Ewan Christian, for Sir William Harcourt. He had first thought, more wisely, of employing Devey, but feared that, as an aristocrat’s architect, Devey would not condescend to such a bicoque, as a house of less than £5000 - ironical in view of Devey’s pioneering of the cottage style (NT).