Littlecote is a big rambling Elizabethan house in the Kennet valley, the majority of it built by William Darrell from 1583.

We approached from the west.  The chapel to the north (left in the picture) is medieval: the conservatory to the south was added in 1809:-

There is topiary in the garden:-

Inside, we started in the Dutch parlour, a fascinating room with seventeenth-century genre paintings on the walls and what look like a more sophisticated, Italianate painting on the ceiling.  The Dutch paintings are traditionally said to have been done by Dutch prisoners-of-war during the second Anglo-Dutch War.  Recently, it has been suggested that they are later and could conceivably have been painted by the young Hogarth which looks implausible.  Either way they are fascinating. 

The ceiling painting:-

The wall paintings:-

Then you come into the Brick Parlour which has a surreal installation which the guide books don’t mention and date back to Peter de Savary’s attempts in the 1980s after all the armour collection was bought by the Royal Armouries to turn the house into some kind of folk museum:-

Beyond, the chapel is also fascinating, a Cromwellian survival:-

It altogether looks as if it deserves more investigation, since the entry in Pevsner does not give much information about the recent history of the house, nor the paintings.