The place

The Postlip Estate is at the end of a three-quarter-mile drive in a valley off B4632, the road between Cheltenham & Winchcombe.  Postlip Hall is in the centre of this photograph from a balloon, with the twelfth century Chapel of St James at the top of the hill and the medieval Tithe Barn at the bottom.

There's been a house here since before the Norman Conquest.  The Chapel, built about 1145, is the oldest of the present buildings.   

A medieval Hall House, probably dating from the fifteenth century, is hiding inside the NE corner of the Hall.  The much grander Jacobean frontage was built by Giles Broadway, entrepreneur and chancer, in 1614. The rest of the house was added gradually thereafter around a central courtyard.   Postlip Housing Association divided it into eight separate units between 1970 & 1985. 

The Tithe Barn's origins are a bit of a mystery, as no documents have survived.   It might be as old as the 12C Chapel. or could have been built at any point between 1140 and about 1400.