They were the grand showcases of Sussex’s wealth and power, standing proudly on fine estates throughout the county.

But sadly, today many of them are gone, lost to fire, neglect, greed – or a whim.

At least 26 historic country houses have disappeared from Sussex’s landscape, some of their names remembered only in the modern buildings that have replaced them.

Now Matthew Beckett, a “frustrated architect” with a love of buildings, has gathered a complete list of the lost country houses of Sussex and created a memorial to them on a new website.

“I am fascinated and deeply saddened by the loss of these houses,” he says. “Sussex has lost a fascinating cross-section of properties, ranging from the aristocratic such as Ashburnham Place, near Battle, to the innovative, such as Richard Norman Shaw’s Leyswood, at Groombridge.

“Hopefully, by highlighting those we have already lost, we will appreciate more those that remain and fight harder to save those under threat.”

Of the many stories behind the disappearance of such fabulous houses, perhaps the most chilling is that of Cowdray Park House near Eastbourne, one of England’s most important early Tudor houses.

Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I stayed at the house, but when Henry began his Dissolution of the Monasteries, the house and its owner, William Fitzwilliam, were cursed by a dispossessed monk from Battle Abbey in 1536, who said, “By fire and water, they line shall come to an end and it shall perish out of this land”.

The curse came true when the house burnt down in 1793, and the family line did indeed die out. The ruins left by the fire are still there today. Owned by Viscount Cowdray, they were stabilised in 2006 and are now open to the public.

Replacement mansions

Other buildings lost through fire have been replaced by houses that still exist today. Among them are Beauport Park, near Hastings, now a hotel complex owned by Dragons’ Den entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne. It was originally an 18th century mansion owned by William Pitt’s Foreign Secretary, Sir James Bland Burgess, before it burned down in 1923.

Burton Park in Burton was a three-storey Tudor mansion built c1520 by the Goring family. It had a central entrance and a gabled roof, but was destroyed by fire in 1739 under the ownership of the Biddulph family.

The Biddulphs engaged Palladian architect Giacomo Leoni to design a replacement, and the result was a much larger house with 13 bay windows on the main elevation. But almost a century later, fire struck once again. The architect Henry Bassett was commissioned to design yet another replacement and the result is today’s three-storey mansion, for many years St Michael’s girls’ school and now luxury apartments. Part of the surrounding estate is a nature reserve owned by the Sussex Wildlife Trust.

Elegant Shillinglee Park, near Arundel, which was built in 1785 and the home of the Earls of Winterton, accidentally burnt down in 1943 after it had been requisitioned during the Second World War. Occupied by Canadian soldiers, disaster struck one night when the soldier in charge of watching the stoves dozed off.

In a memoir, one of the soldiers, Stewart Hastings Bull, described Shillinglee as “very elegant and grand ... most of the beautiful paintings and other works of art had been stored in the front two rooms and locked in.”

He descried how “fire was roaring along the wooden panelled wall and there was no way out ...”

He escaped through a window, but saw “the house was one big blaze – a great massive blaze, sweeping up from the ground.”

Outside, watching the blaze, the soldier noticed a tall woman with grey hair standing next to him. She was “the lady of the manor, Lady Winterton ... she was standing there disconsolate.”

She offered him her husband’s sweater to keep him warm on a freezing winter’s night and he wrote, “I said, ‘Thank you – here you are, your ancestral home is burning to the ground and you’re thinking of a young Canadian soldier.’” The house was rebuilt and is now private residences.

Demolished

Other houses lost this century were The Warren, near Worthing, which was pulled down in 1972 because it was “surplus’ to requirements”. Whithurst House at Whithurst disappeared in 1911 and was replaced by a Jacobean-style replica mansion house once rumoured to be owned by Robbie Williams. Offington Hall, near Worthing, home to the 8th and 9th Barons De La Warr was demolished in 1963 to make way for the Warren roundabout.

When the house was extended in the 1850s, a two-mile tunnel leading to the ancient hill fort at Cissbury was discovered and it was rumoured that it contained ancient treasure. Men sent in to find it returned terrified, claiming hissing serpents had slithered towards them. The only part left standing is the stable block, which is Grade II listed and occupied by Offington Hall Riding School.

Perhaps the most mysterious lost Sussex house is Brambletye House, near Forest Row. Three towers and a moat are all that is left of this once fine Jacobean house, abandoned in 1683 by its owner, Sir James Richards, who was accused of treason and fled to Spain.

The ruins were plundered by curious tourists in the 1820s after its history was rewritten by popular novelist Horace Smith. Today it stands on privately owned land, its towers stabilised in the 1930s and granted Grade II listing, but still fragile enough to warrant an entry on English Heritage’s At Risk register.