Studley Royal is a World Heritage Site owned by the National Trust, but maintained by English Heritage. The estate is home to Fountains Abbey, one of the earliest, largest and best preserved Cistercian monasteries in Britain, founded in 1132. It is also the site of a Palladian banqueting house, built in the estate’s Georgian water gardens for the politician and South Sea Bubble speculator John Aislabie (1670–1742), who inherited the estate in 1693. It was originally envisaged as an orangery, but later embellished, deliberately rusticated, and fitted out for the purpose its name suggests. There is only one painting, an equestrian portrait of 1740, of the Governor of Surat with a hawk on his arm. Funds for the purchase, restoration and endowment of this estate by the National Trust were raised with grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Historic Buildings Council (now English Heritage), the Countryside Commission, and by appeal, in 1983.