Friston Parish

Once part of the Friston Hall Estate, Blackheath House lies on the north bank of the River Alde and is surrounded by woodland, creeks and heath. It was sold in the early-nineteenth century to create the Black Heath Estate. An earlier house on the site was replaced in c. 1887 by an elaborate brick mansion, which was re-fronted in the middle of the twentieth century and later internally gutted by the owners, award-wining architects Michael and Patty Hopkins. Once used as a shooting lodge, the house is set in an oval-shaped plantation with a series of drives created before 1839. On the estate are the surviving remnants of a large duck decoy and decoy lodge dating back to at least the early-eighteenth century and an early-nineteenth century keeper’s cottage nestling in the plantation.
Not open to the public

Once the site of a sixteenth century mansion, the remains of Friston Hall stand isolated from Friston village. It had a succession of wealthy and influential owners including the Bacon, Johnson and Wentworth families, the latter still in residence. Part of the estate was sold to become the Black Heath Estate and most of the mansion demolished in the early-nineteenth century when a tenanted farmhouse. Some walls from a seventeenth century enclosure around the house and octagonal summerhouse survive, as do an eighteenth century gateway with ornate iron gates on the central axis of an entrance drive with a replanted avenue of trees that dates back at least the eighteenth century, although likely to be much older.
Not open to the public