Charles Harper, a leisure traveller in 1904 said of Blickling, ‘There it stands, like some proud, conscious beauty, isolated… It might be some enchanted palace, not waked to life and love’. 

Set back with beautifully ornate Dutch gabled service wings, Blickling Hall rests like an empress. Resolute in her loyal support, she sits central to the drama with her henchmen evenly distributed on either side, balancing and propping up the regime. Blicking Hall is a building of self-assurance and pride; a masterpiece of Jacobean architecture.

Commissioned by the powerful Elizabethan courtier, Sir Henry Hobart, it was built between 1618-29 on the existing foundations of a medieval manor house. The manor house was the home of the Boleyn family and most likely the birthplace of Anne Boleyn. It is said that her headless ghost appears on 19th May, the anniversary of her execution.

Blickling Hall as we know it today was designed by Robert Lyminge, the same architect chosen by Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I’s chief advisor, to design Hatfield House. Both Hatfield and Blickling are fine examples of prodigy houses. Prodigy houses were designed between 1570 and 1620 and were designed to be showy and to entice Elizabeth I and later James I on their annual progress around the country. The architectural historian Sir John Summerson saw them as the ‘the most daring of all English buildings’.

Built in the midst of a period of successful trade between Norfolk and the Flemish coast, one design hallmark of this mercantile connection is evident. The hall demonstrates the first Dutch gables in the UK on the east and west service wings as well as gable ends of the façades of the main hall. Most prominently, these are seen on the east and south facades. Here, the gable end is a key feature rhythmically sitting at intervals along the bayed fronts with corner turrets triumphantly finishing the sequences at either end.

The house stands in the south-east corner of the parkland and throughout the hall from the rooms of the piano nobile, there are sweeping views down to the lake, formal parterre and surrounding parkland. The beauty of Blickling is its scale. It is inviting yet grand and internally at times domestic yet palatial.

Flanked by magnificent mature yew hedges abutting the service wings along the south lawns, one enters over the medieval dry moat. Before entering the hall, there is a sheltered inner courtyard with the high walls of the hall encircling them. This was designed as part of the prodigy house style where the monarch would have got down from their carriage, safely within the confines of the hall.

Upon entering one is met by an intricate, wooden staircase that envelopes the main hall. Carved figurines stand at intervals along the balustrade. Detailed and flamboyant Jacobean plaster ceilings in the Long Gallery, South Drawing Room and West Turret bedroom are the masterworks of the interiors. Ostensibly perilous dagger like castings hang from the ceiling of the South Drawing Room. These are unsettling to stand under but their effect exquisite. The 18th century Chinese bedroom with its hand crafted, lacquered furnishings and delicately hand painted Chinoiserie wallpaper is a beautiful and complete room with views out over the parterre, up the avenue and onto an 18th century Doric temple.

Much of the landscaped garden, seen today, was created in the 18th century. A mile from the house and out into the parkland, lies the more unusual Portland stone pyramid mausoleum entombing the 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire. Seen clearly from the south end of the lake, the tomb was commissioned to be based on the Pyramid of Cestius in Rome. Lady Suffield chose the fashionable Italian architect Joseph Bonomi the Elder to carry this out. Bright white upon completion it has now greatly weathered and sits quietly within the Great wood. Other famous architects and landscape designers also had their chances to put their mark on the estate with both Samuel Wyatt and Humphry Repton being credited as possible designers of the Neo-classical orangery, also built in the 18th century. The most recent change is to the parterre which was reworked by Norah Lindsay in the 1930’s, the grand nine-bay east façade of the hall sits as the perfect backdrop.

Blickling’s history is filled with people of power and status from its founding owners to its last in 1937. The 11th Marquess of Lothian was its final resident lived at Blickling before bequeathing it to the National Trust. He is attributed with persuading the Americans to join the war effort in WWII shortly before his death in 1940. Most importantly for the house, he was the successful driving force behind the creation of the Country Houses Scheme in 1937. This enabled the first large-scale transfer of mansion houses to the Trust in lieu of death duties. The house therefore endured, and it remains a jewel in the National Trust’s crown.   

One hundred years after Charles Harper swept down the hill and was confronted by Blickling Hall, on a bright February evening of this year, I stopped to admire the sun setting on her. Long shadows fell across the south front, the red brick glowed, and it seemed the same could certainly still be said for one of the county’s and country’s finest stately homes.

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