estateCountry House Rescue · Season 3, Episode 5 · Aired April 3, 2011
Kentchurch Court
Kentchurch, Herefordshire
Yes. This one is still open.
What happened after
Grade I listed, ~1,000-year Lucas-Scudamore family seat; operates 25-acre gardens, guided history tours, and manor-house/lodge stays (sleeps up to 20) bookable via Bolthole Retreats.
What happened on the show
Kentchurch Court has been handed down the Scudamore line since 1058, which made it, in Ruth Watson's own reckoning, one of the most historically important houses she ever worked with. That weight of history near Kentchurch in Herefordshire was also the pressure. Current owner Jan Lucas-Scudamore was finding the Grade I listed house increasingly hard to run, while her son Joss wanted to build up some life and business experience before he inherited the responsibility. Ruth's conviction was straightforward: opening the house more fully to the public was the way to save it for the family, letting its exceptional history earn the income that would keep the Scudamores in place. The episode's tension was whether she could bring Jan around to that idea and coax Joss into taking a more active role in the estate's running. For a house that had stayed in one family for nearly a thousand years, the stakes at Kentchurch were about as high as the series ever set them.
After the cameras left
Kentchurch Court is open and earning. As of our latest verification pass the roughly thousand-year Lucas-Scudamore seat runs twenty-five acres of gardens, offers guided history tours, and lets the manor house and a lodge for stays sleeping up to twenty, booked through a holiday specialist. We fetched the official site directly and confirmed the live accommodation and tour offerings and current contact details. So the case Ruth made near Kentchurch, that opening the doors was the way to keep the family in the house, is exactly the model now in force: history tours and high-end stays funding one of the most significant houses the show ever tried to save, still in Scudamore hands.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.