Sherborne Castle& Gardens

Sir Walter Raleigh built the house in 1594; Sir John Digby bought it in 1617, and his descendants — the Wingfield Digby family — own and live in it still, running it privately as a member of Historic Houses with no national body involved. Visitors get the castle interiors with their nationally important furniture, paintings and porcelain, and forty-two acres of gardens landscaped by Capability Brown around a fifty-acre lake, an RHS partner garden. One clarification worth carrying: the romantic ruin across the lake is Sherborne Old Castle, a separate English Heritage site — this, the lived-in one, is the family's.