Heritage reinstated

The grand estates and houses of East Anglia have been brought back to life in recent years

- Penny Churchill

THE Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII freed up large tracts of land throughout East Anglia, allowing the newly rich gentry to create farms and estates on former monastic lands. In the late Tudor period, prosperous landowners built grand country houses for themselves, together with farmhouses and cottages for the tenants who worked the land.

The building material of choice was often brick, first introduced from the Low Countries in the late medieval period—some imported as ballast aboard ships exporting English wool to the Continent, others made in brickyards established in East Anglia by Dutch immigrants. It was all part of a tradition of fine craftsmanship that still survives throughout the region, as can be seen in a number of meticulously restored houses that have recently come onto the market.

Launched in today’s COUNTRY LIFE at a guide price of £2.95 million through the Chelmsford office of Strutt & Parker (01245 254600), Grade II-listed Coggeshall Hall near Kelvedon, Essex, is an immaculate country house of great character set amid the open countryside of north Essex, with 12 acres of formal gardens and pasture bounded to the east by the River Blackwater.

Described by selling agent Mark Rimell as ‘a house of two halves’, it comprises a late16th-century house built, according to its Historic England listing, ‘circa 1575, mainly timber-framed and plastered with some weatherboarding and plum bricks in Flemish bond, roofed with handmade red plain tiles, with an early 19th century cross-wing of plum brick forming a T-plan and later entrance elevation’.