The Abbey, Aston Abbotts
There has been a property at the location since before the Domesday Book. Although the Abbey has never been an ecclesiastical building, it was so named having been built on land confiscated from the Abbotts of St. Albans by Henry VIII.
The property has had some illustrious owners including the Duke of Buckingham, Sir James Clark Ross, the polar explorer who gave his name to many geographical features in the Antarctic, such as the Ross Ice Shelf, and President Benes of Czechoslovakia.
During the Second World War from 1940 to 1945 Dr Edvard Beneš, the exiled President of Czechoslovakia, stayed at the Abbey in Aston Abbotts. During this period the Morton family moved to The White House, Aston Abbotts. Major Morton being invested him as a Commander in the Order of the White Lion (Order of the White Lion, third class), for services to the Home Guard and wartime defence of the Czechoslovaks.
In the gardens of the Abbey there is a lake with two islands, named after the Ross expedition's ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.
References
- ^ Pevsner, Nikolaus and E. Williamson, The buildings of England: Buckinghamshire, 1994, p. 145
- ^ Country Times & Landscape, November 1989, pp. 61–63
- ^ "The Abbey, Buckinghamshire". Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 2013-01-26.
- ^ "History - Sir James Clark Ross". Aston Abbotts. Retrieved 12 January 2017.