estateCountry House Rescue · Season 2, Episode 7 · Aired April 15, 2010
Abbey Dore Court
Abbey Dore, Herefordshire
It has since closed.
On the show
Season 2, Episode 7 · April 15, 2010 · country house
revisited in Country House Rescue Revisited (2011-09-15)
What happened after
Garden attraction (10 acres incl. 6-acre private garden on the River Dore) is now closed; no reopening or events information found.
What happened on the show
Abbey Dore Court is a Victorian house and garden in the village of Abbey Dore, Herefordshire, built in the late nineteenth century on the site of a former public house. Charis Ward bought it in 1967 and spent the following decades turning the grounds into a plantsman's garden that became a genuine draw for visitors. The house was the weak point. While the gardens pulled a crowd, the building itself had recently fallen into disrepair, and it was Charis's granddaughter Clare who was determined to turn the place around, with Ruth Watson's help. Ruth's first instinct was a bed-and-breakfast to fund the repairs and restoration Abbey Dore needed. When she came back for the Revisited episode, though, the family had gone their own way: Charis and Clare had rejected the B&B idea and were keen to show her the self-catering holiday business they had set up instead, a different route to the same goal of making the gardens' popularity pay for the house behind them.
After the cameras left
Abbey Dore Court has closed. The garden attraction, ten acres including a six-acre private garden along the River Dore, is no longer operating, and we found no reopening or events information to suggest otherwise. We hold this at medium confidence: the closure notice reached us through a search synthesis of the relevant page rather than a source we fetched cleanly, and the garden's old domain now redirects to an unrelated hijacked site, a dead-domain-recapture pattern we do not treat as evidence and would never link. What is clear enough is that the visitor business in Abbey Dore has wound down. The plantsman's garden Charis Ward built over half a century, and the self-catering venture Clare launched to save it, do not appear to be trading today. No firm closure date surfaced.
Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.