Sotterley Park aerial image
This aerial photograph shows Sotterley Hall, a Grade I listed country house set within historic parkland in north-east Suffolk, a few miles inland from the coast at Southwold and Beccles. The present house is an elegant early-18th-century brick mansion, remodelled in the Palladian style c.1740, though parts of the estate go back much further.
The Hall has been associated with the Barne family since the 18th century, when Miles Barne (1718–1780), a wealthy London merchant and MP, purchased Sotterley in 1744. The family greatly enlarged and remodelled the house and laid out the surrounding parkland in the mid-18th century, creating the designed landscape we see today. The park includes sweeping lawns, lakes, and avenues of trees, and is a fine example of the English landscape style.
The wider Sotterley Park is registered as a Grade II listed historic landscape on the Register of Parks and Gardens. It retains medieval origins, with evidence of a former deer park, as well as later additions by the Barnes. Within its bounds are several listed buildings, ancient woodland, and a number of fine veteran oaks and sweet chestnuts, some hundreds of years old.
The estate also contains the parish church of St Margaret’s, a beautiful medieval church with a distinctive round tower, standing within the park close to the Hall – an unusual and evocative survival of the medieval manorial landscape.
Today, Sotterley remains a private estate, but its parkland and architecture continue to illustrate the long history of Suffolk’s landed families and the layered development of English country house landscapes from medieval to Georgian times.
Sotterley Park aerial image
This aerial photograph shows Sotterley Hall, a Grade I listed country house set within historic parkland in north-east Suffolk, a few miles inland from the coast at Southwold and Beccles. The present house is an elegant early-18th-century brick mansion, remodelled in the Palladian style c.1740, though parts of the estate go back much further.
The Hall has been associated with the Barne family since the 18th century, when Miles Barne (1718–1780), a wealthy London merchant and MP, purchased Sotterley in 1744. The family greatly enlarged and remodelled the house and laid out the surrounding parkland in the mid-18th century, creating the designed landscape we see today. The park includes sweeping lawns, lakes, and avenues of trees, and is a fine example of the English landscape style.
The wider Sotterley Park is registered as a Grade II listed historic landscape on the Register of Parks and Gardens. It retains medieval origins, with evidence of a former deer park, as well as later additions by the Barnes. Within its bounds are several listed buildings, ancient woodland, and a number of fine veteran oaks and sweet chestnuts, some hundreds of years old.
The estate also contains the parish church of St Margaret’s, a beautiful medieval church with a distinctive round tower, standing within the park close to the Hall – an unusual and evocative survival of the medieval manorial landscape.
Today, Sotterley remains a private estate, but its parkland and architecture continue to illustrate the long history of Suffolk’s landed families and the layered development of English country house landscapes from medieval to Georgian times.