Somerleyton Hall

Somerleyton Hall stands in Suffolk’s flat countryside as a Grade II* listed country house with a 5,000-acre estate. The 12-acre formal gardens and surrounding park are also Grade II* listed, and the house itself was rebuilt in the 1840s by Samuel Morton Peto as an Anglo-Italian mansion. Its clock tower still carries a timepiece by Benjamin Vulliamy, fitted when the building was completed in 1850. The estate has belonged to the Crossley family since 1863, when carpet manufacturer Sir Francis Crossley bought it. Today Hugh Crossley, the fourth Baron Somerleyton, lives there with his family and runs a rewilding scheme on 1,000 acres. Free-roaming cattle, large black pigs and Exmoor ponies now graze land once managed more conventionally. The house and gardens have drawn visitors for decades. In 1955, Christopher Cockerell tested early hovercraft designs on the estate’s lake. The yew hedge maze, planted in 1846 by William Andrews Nesfield, is counted among Britain’s finest. Joseph Paxton’s ridge-and-furrow greenhouse still stands, a smaller version of his Crystal Palace design. The gardens also include a walled garden, an aviary, a loggia and a 90-metre pergola draped in roses and wisteria. Statues, urns and a sundial are scattered through the planting, while specimen trees and drifts of rhododendrons colour the informal areas. Beyond the formal grounds, the wider estate stretches across 7.7 square miles. A fifth of the land is being rewilded, with plans to extend rewilding to include Fritton Lake and the Suffolk Sandlings. The project is part of WildEast, a foundation encouraging regenerative farming across East Anglia. The house has appeared in films and television, from The Weekend Murders to The Crown, and its maze inspired a key scene in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. The gardens and park remain open to visitors, offering long walks among mature trees and newly wild landscapes.