Midford Castle

Midford Castle was built in 1775 for Henry Disney Roebuck to a design by the architect John Carter: three semicircular towers conjoined in Gothic style to form the shape of the clubs symbol on a playing card. A magazine article of 1899 claimed Roebuck asked for the design because he had won the money for the house at cards, but this is unlikely, since the porch that forms the symbol's stem was a later addition; the layout was more probably taken from an article published the year before, in Builder's Magazine in 1774.

In 1810 the castle was bought by one of the Conollys of Castletown House in County Kildare, who added the porch and built the stables and a chapel known as the priory. Soon afterwards, William Smith — later known as the father of English geology — proposed carrying stone from the estate's Kingham Field quarry down to Tucking Mill by railway for shipment on to Bath and London by canal. In April 1814 Smith mortgaged the remainder of his estate to Charles Conolly, who took control of the railway; the scheme failed, and in 1819 Conolly had Smith committed to the King's Bench Prison for debt, taking over Smith's sawmill and his house at Tucking Mill. The last of the Conollys sold Midford in 1901, and the priory chapel fell into disrepair.

Michael Fenwick Briggs and his wife Isabel — the novelist known by her pen name Isabel Colegate — bought Midford in 1961 and carried out extensive renovation, incorporating the ruined chapel into the garden as a "picturesque ruin". The Grade I listed castle was sold to the actor Nicolas Cage for £5 million in July 2007; Cage sold it on in 2009 to Scott Adams, founder of Nutrisport, and it was then restored into its current form as both the Adams family home and a boutique hotel.