
Some of England`s grandest country houses are to be found in this prosperous rural county. The Elizabethan Renaissance Kirby Hall, the Jacobean mansion at Apethorpe, the late seventeenth-century French-inspired Boughton, Hawksmoor`s stately Baroque Easton Neston & the interiors of Althorp provide a fascinating survey of changing taste through the centuries. Complementing them are smaller buildings of great character, supreme among them those of Sir Thomas Tresham: the eccentric & ingenious Triangular Lodge at Rushton & the evocative New Beild at Lyveden. Of no less interest are the fine churches, from Anglo-Saxon Brixworth to the noble Gothic of Warmington, Rushden & Finedon & from All Saints, Northampton, one of the grandest seventeenth-century churches outside London, to Comper`s St Mary`s, Wellingborough. Chief among the towns, Northampton not only has distinguished Victorian & Edwardian public, commercial & industrial buildings but also the principal work in England by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.