Search Inventory

Broke Hall

Surviving largely intact, the landscape park and garden around Broke Hall were laid out following designs by Humphry Repton for which he produced a Red Book in 1791. This coincided with a remodelling of the existing house by James Wyatt. Earlier parkland features dating from before 1768 survive such as two avenues to the west and south of the house. The hall and surrounding buildings were converted to apartments and residential properties during the 1980s and some new houses have been built in its grounds.
Not open to the public

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Nacton Parish

Abbot’s Hall

Abbot’s Hall, today home to the Food Museum, is a listed early-eighteenth century house on the edge of Stowmarket. Its pleasure grounds include an ornamental canal and smaller water features from the period that may have developed from medieval fishponds. The canal has a walkway beside it and later early- to mid-eighteenth century pavilion. The site also includes a walled garden.
Open to the public

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Stowmarket

Staverton Park

Staverton Park is an early surviving medieval deer park dating back to the thirteenth century. It appears to have been independent of a large house and managed in more or less the same way for over seven hundred years. It is a rare survival of woodland pasture habitat and contains many veteran trees, some over four hundred years old.
Not open to the public

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Wantisden Parish

Somerleyton Hall

Surrounding the listed Somerleyton Hall (Grade II*), a formal nineteenth century garden partly by W. A. Nesfield, with pleasure grounds and walled kitchen gardens (Grade II*) containing plant houses probably influenced by Joseph Paxton, set in the park of this manor house of seventeenth century origin with nineteenth century alterations.
Gardens open to the general public at certain times of the year. Check their website for details.

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Somerleyton Parish

Kentwell Hall

Kentwell Hall is a moated manor house surrounded by gardens dating from the mid-sixteenth century with later developments that include partially moated walled gardens. It stands in a roughly triangular-shaped park with seventeenth century origins that was developed in the late-eighteenth century, possibly by Humprey Repton, and later in the early-nineteenth century.
Gardens open to the general public at certain times and for event days. Check their website for details.

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Long Melford Parish

Kesgrave House

Built c. 1812, Kesgrave House was a large country house built on rising ground with a dramatic undercroft and overlooking Playford Mere in the Fynn valley. It incorporated farm buildings from an earlier house at Pogson’s Farm that became its stable yard and service buildings. It was demolished c. 1841 and the site was eventually cut in two by the railway line that opened between Ipswich and Woodbridge in 1859. All that remains of the house site is an embankment representing the site of the undercroft and, separated by the railway line, the remains of Pogson’s Farm, now known as Colonial’s Farm Cottage.
Not open to the public

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Playford Parish

Pakenham Old Hall

Pakenham Old Hall is the site of Pakenham Hall, a large Tudor manor house and home to the Spring family during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Depicted on a map of 1783 when owned by the Gough Calthorpe family, it once had an avenue of trees and series of ponds on the central axis of the mansion that stretched out to the north-west. The mansion was demolished between 1804 and 1810 and the site became a tenanted farmhouse and known as Old Hall Farm. The present house on the site is believed to have been built c. 1910 when it became known as Pakenham Old Hall. The site of the old mansion can be seen in cropmarks and the avenue has survived as a thicket of trees and shrubs with overgrown ponds.
Not open to the public

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Pakenham Parish

Wissett Hall

Said to be on the site of a substantial earlier house, Wissett Hall has an early-seventeenth century core but was substantially altered and extended in the late-Victorian and early-twentieth century in the Arts and Crafts style. A farmhouse by the early-nineteenth century, and probably from a much earlier date, it had a small area of garden and parkland until surrounding fields were slowly taken in and converted to wooded parkland during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the early-twentieth century the alterations to the house and gardens may have been designed by Walter Sarel, an architect renowned for his conversation of much earlier buildings in the Arts and Craft style, at the same time redesigning the gardens in the same style with a mix of garden compartments and wilder areas, influenced by and often working with Gertrude Jekyll. At this time features added were a walled garden with crinkle-crankle walls and terraced lawn with ha-ha. The gardens continue to be maintained as separate areas with a rose garden and formal box garden.
Not open to the public

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Wissett Parish

Rookery Park

On the site of an earlier house, early-nineteenth century Rookery Park, historically called The Rookery, stands in its own park to the east of the village of Yoxford. The house is not listed by Historic England due to later substantial alterations. The park was in existence at the end of the eighteenth century and some parkland trees survive from this period, although mostly they date to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A canal-like pond and partly-walled garden were in existence at the beginning of the nineteenth century, both perhaps of an earlier date, with a late nineteenth century cottage orné lodge at the entrance. In the early-twentieth century a new stable block, serpentine lakes and formal north garden were constructed. Rookery Park changed ownership many times during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, finally becoming the property of the present family who have owned it for over a century and who are conducting a programme of partial restoration/repurposing of the gardens and buildings on the site.
Not open to the public except for booked holiday accommodation

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Yoxford Parish

Satis House

One of the larger of the village houses, Satis House was originally built in the mid-eighteenth century but has later alterations and extensions. With no parkland of its own, its position south of Cockfield Hall and the River Yox gave it the advantage of a fine ‘borrowed’ landscape of parkland that could be viewed from its pleasure gardens, planted with a variety of ornamental trees. Late-eighteenth and nineteenth features included an irregular elongated pond, island that may have been a small mound with likely summerhouse from which to view the parkland to the north, a surviving icehouse built into the embankment beside the main A12 road between Ipswich and Lowestoft and surviving, small walled garden with low crinkle-crankle wall. In the nineteenth century Satis House had an orangery that has not survived. Part of the pleasure gardens north of the house and the stable yard are now in separate ownership with the stable building converted for residential use. Today Satis House is a hotel and restaurant with a number of nineteenth century ornamental trees surviving in its gardens.
Open to the public as a hotel and restaurant

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Yoxford Parish