Chavenage House (Glos)

“We hope that when you visit us, you will feel that you are in the relaxed atmosphere of a family house. At Chavenage you can escape into the peaceful surroundings of a Cotswold manor, virtually unchanged for 400 years.” So says Caroline Lowsley-Williams on the chaotic homepage of the Chavenage House website. Also virtually unchanged for hundreds of years is the Lowsley-Williams’ support of the notorious Beaufort Hunt, based at nearby Badminton (Chavenage’s 2,000 acres lie between former Beaufort stalwart Prince Charles’s Highgrove and Princess Anne’s Gatcombe Park – who the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald gleefully reported back in 2004 joined the Beaufort at a meet at Chavenage House, becoming the first royal to hunt after the Hunting Act was announced by parliament). George Lowsley-Williams, who died in 1937, is listed in the Beaufort Hunt archives as a member from at least 1891. David Lowsley-Williams, who died in 2023 when James ‘Hank’ Lowsley-Williams inherited the Manor and its grounds, was the ‘Beaufort’s Monday Field Master and a steadfast member of the Finance and the Hunt Committees’. And now James – who used to present videos for the Global Cycling Network – appears to be carrying on this barbaric alliance. Cirencester Illegal Hunt Watch found the Beaufort meeting on Chavenage Green near the House in February 2025, saying in their Facebook post that “They met at Chavenage Green, a historical site next to Chavenage House now owned by James Lowsley Williams who inherited it from his grandfather. Shame he didn’t decide to banish the Beaufort Hunt from his property and land on this beautiful sunny day.” It seems unlikely, but perhaps Hank doesn’t know that in 2021 two members of the Beaufort Hunt, were charged with illegal hunting (case dropped), or that in 2022 the Beaufort was the first hunt to be properly exposed for having untrained staff shoot their unwanted hounds. Or that recently the Beaufort has been filmed hunting in the grounds of Highgrove (presumably with the landowners’ permission) and in a separate incident their hounds captured on CCTV ‘marauding’ through a private garden in a local village. With his family history, though, not knowing all of that does seem very unlikely. Disappointing, Hank, very disappointing…