Radway

The earliest known record of Radway is in the Domesday Book of 1086. In medieval times its lands were divided between Arbury Priory and Stoneleigh Abbey. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII in the 1530s the lands of Radway were granted to various of Henry's circle, notably the Coke family. As the lands were sold over the following years, the manorialism system of Radway broke down. The Battle of Edgehill, one of the early major engagements of the English Civil War, was fought in fields around the village and in the adjoining parishes of Ratley and Kineton. Radway became a centre of Puritanism during and after the Commonwealth period. Persecution of Radway's Quakers and…

The Grange, originally an Elizabethan gentleman's house, was extensively re-modelled by Sanderson Miller in Gothic Revival style. It stands below the site of the original Stoneleigh Abbey grange and is still a private house. It was occupied by Douglas Haig before he became Commander in Chief on the Western Front in the First World War. The Grange is now owned by David Richards, former chairman of Aston Martin. At the top of the ridge adjoining the hamlet of Edgehill is the Octagonal Tower, a folly designed by Sanderson Miller as a scale model of a tower at Warwick Castle. The folly has been a pub since it was built, named in 1817 as the Inniskilling Dragoon, but now the Castle Inn. It is…