estateCountry House Rescue · Season 3, Episode 7 · Aired April 17, 2011
Hill Place
Swanmore, Hampshire
The trail goes cold here; we could not verify whether it is still open. The last confirmed sighting we found dates to 2011.
On the show
Season 3, Episode 7 · April 17, 2011 · country house
revisited in Country House Rescue Revisited (2011-10-13)
What happened after
We have not been able to confirm what happened to this business since the episode aired. If you know its current status, we would like to hear from you.
What happened on the show
Hill Place, a Grade II listed Georgian villa near Swanmore in Hampshire, had cost Will and Rebecca Dobson almost everything already. Since inheriting it they had given up their own home and their jobs to throw themselves at the expensive, urgent repairs the house demanded, while at the same time attempting to run the estate as a commercial concern. Ruth Watson's advice was bold: relocate themselves entirely so the whole of Hill Place could be freed up for money-making schemes, chief among them special upmarket wedding weekends aimed at well-heeled brides. The complication was family. Will's mother and her siblings were sharply critical of the plans, and Ruth found herself brokering a peace as much as a business strategy near Swanmore. When she returned for the Revisited episode, she wanted to see whether the up-market wedding idea had taken off and whether the truce she had negotiated among the relatives had actually held together.
After the cameras left
Hill Place's current status is one we cannot confirm. Directory listings show it operated as a popular wedding venue near Swanmore, but one source records the property being put on the market in 2019, and the official domain now refuses connections, which points to a dead or abandoned server. Across our searches, nothing surfaced to confirm continued operation, a completed sale, a renaming or a closure in the years since. Stated plainly: as of our latest verification pass we last see Hill Place as a trading wedding venue before the 2019 market listing, and we have no reliable evidence either way about what it is doing now. We have flagged it for a fresh check. The upmarket-weddings business Ruth helped the Dobsons build was real; whether it survived their apparent decision to sell is the part we could not establish.
Sources
Last checked 2026-07-19.