Tracy Park

Tracy Park is an estate near Wick, South Gloucestershire, close to the boundary with Bath and North East Somerset and approximately from the World Heritage City of Bath. Set in approximately of parkland, the house is a Grade II listed building. It has a 17th-century nucleus behind a classical two-storey front built of Ashlar stone. The gate piers either side of the carriageway leading to the house are also Grade II listed. The estate is documented from 1246. Throughout the 17th and most of the 18th centuries, the estate was owned by a succession of Bristol merchants and tradesmen, culminating in Robert Bush, a pewterer, who purchased the estate in 1774. His son, Robert, constructed a classical façade in c. 1800, obscuring much of the original building. Sold for more than £12,000 to General Sir William Gabriel Davy in 1820, it was much altered and rebuilt by his son, a prominent Freemason, who adorned the estate with many Masonic symbols. The estate again changed hands in 1926. The mansion ceased to be a private house in 1973, when it was auctioned and subsequently became a golf and country club and hotel. Early history During the Roman occupation of Britain, a large villa was sited on what is today the Tracy park estate. It was excavated in 1865, when it was found that the villa had once been enclosed by earthworks encompassing some two acres of land. Standing stones, thought to be the remains of a long barrow, just under a mile from the house, suggest that the site was occupied at an even earlier date. The present site became the property of John de Tracye in 1246; the park probably constituted 100 acres of land at the bottom of Freezing Hill and his manor house was likely near the church and not in the park, although its exact location is unknown. His descendants, Lords of the Manor of Doynton, held the property until the end of the 16th century.