WITH little sign that the recent surge of activity in the country-house market is about to run out of steam, the autumn campaign has hit the ground running in Suffolk with the launch onto the market of three exceptional country houses, each with its own fascinating story to tell.
For sale through Strutt & Parker (01223 459464) at a guide price of £6.35 million, handsome, Grade II*-listed Little Haugh Hall sits in some 60 acres of formal gardens, parkland and woodland at the heart of a picturesque 162-acre estate near the village of Norton, nine miles east of Bury St Edmunds and 22 from Newmarket. Cited by Giles Allen of Strutt & Parker as ‘a rare example for East Anglia —where most houses are timber-framed— of a proper Georgian country house with high ceilings and well-proportioned rooms’, the present early- and late-Georgian Little Haugh Hall boasts a magnificent interior that, according to Pevsner, ‘reveals itself to be the finest of that date in the county’.
Records go back to 1212 when King John gave the estate to Reginald de Dammartin. It was later held as part of the lands of the Abbey of Ixworth before being acquired, in the late 1600s, by Thomas Macro, a prosperous grocer, apothecary and five-time chief magistrate of Bury St Edmunds, who lived and made his fortune in the ancient house in Bury’s Meat Market known as Cupola House. He bought the estate of Little Haugh with its Tudor or Jacobean house as a country retreat, which later passed to his eldest surviving son, the antiquary Cox Macro.
Denne historien er fra September 16, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra September 16, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
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Forever a chorister
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Best of British
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Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
