estateCountry House Rescue · Season 1, Episode 1 · Aired December 9, 2008
Cothay Manor
Stawley, Somerset
Open. The rescue stuck and it continues to operate.
On the show
Season 1, Episode 1 · December 9, 2008 · country house
UPGRADE from inventory "not resolved" flag: full 40-episode Wikipedia spine found; premise confirmed as struggling-property rescue (expert visits, business turnaround advice), not a startup/aspirational format as the inventory speculated. Host Ruth Watson S1-3, Simon Davis S4. Revisited in Country House Rescue Revisited (2009-11-11).
What happened after
Grade I listed medieval manor with 12 acres of colour-themed gardens; under new ownership, gardens open seasonally (Apr-Sep) to visitors.
What happened on the show
Mary-Anne and Alastair Robb took on Cothay Manor in 1993 when it was little more than an empty shell, and for years they gave the medieval house near Stawley, Somerset, all their time and every spare pound. The Grade I listed manor and its colour-themed gardens looked the part. As a business, though, it was losing serious money, and a harder question hung over everything: who would take the place on when the Robbs could no longer manage it? Ruth Watson arrived with the estate close to breaking point. Her plan leaned on the practical revenue a house like this can earn, better refreshment facilities for garden visitors and a proper calendar of events to give people a reason to come back through the season. When she returned the following year for the Revisited follow-up, the questions she carried were the same two that had defined her first visit: had the events and tea-room ideas started turning a profit, and had the family settled the awkward matter of who would run Cothay in the future?
After the cameras left
Cothay Manor came through. As of our latest verification pass the manor has passed into new ownership and trades on its history, marketing itself as a historic medieval manor house, with the twelve acres of colour-themed gardens opening to visitors seasonally from April to September. That is a meaningful outcome for a property that was haemorrhaging money when the cameras first arrived: the succession worry that shadowed the Robbs' tenure has resolved into a fresh custodianship, and the garden-visiting model Ruth pushed is the one still earning its keep. We confirmed the seasonal opening and the current branding, though a couple of the supporting signals came via search snippet rather than a source we fetched directly, so treat the exact opening window as current to 2026 rather than fixed.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.