An unusual number of good National Trust and privately owned houses sit within twenty to forty minutes of the site, which makes Cholsey Grange a sensible base for a week of them.
Within half an hour or so
Hughenden Manor
Disraeli's country house, with a walled garden and a wartime secret. About twenty minutes.
West Wycombe Park and the Hell-Fire Caves
A Palladian house, a hilltop mausoleum and a mile of chalk tunnels. Twenty minutes.
Cliveden
Formal gardens and woodland above a long reach of the Thames. Half an hour.
Stowe
Landscape gardens on a scale nothing else quite matches. Forty minutes.
Nuffield Place
The surprisingly modest home of the man who founded Morris Motors. Half an hour.
Waddesdon Manor
A French renaissance chateau dropped into Buckinghamshire by the Rothschilds. Forty-five minutes.
Stonor Park
Eight hundred years in the same family, in a deer park over the hill. Fifteen minutes.
Waterperry Gardens
Eight acres of ornamental gardens near Wheatley. Forty minutes.
Opening times vary a good deal by season, and several of these require booking in advance. Check before you set off.
Also nearby
The Chiltern Open Air Museum at Chalfont St Giles rebuilds rescued historic buildings on a wooded site; Milton’s Cottage, where Paradise Lost was finished, is in the same village. Lacey Green windmill is the oldest smock mill in the country.