End of an era

After more than a century in one family, the sale of a great Suffolk estate reveals a history that runs from a 17th-century MP via a Repton Red Book to a 'Galloping Major'

TODAY sees the launch onto the market for the first time in 101 years of the historic 1,763-acre Glemham Hall estate. On the outskirts of Little Glemham, it is seven miles from Aldeburgh on Suffolk's magical heritage coast, eight miles from Woodbridge and 14 miles from the county town of Ipswich. Tim Fagan of Strutt & Parker (01473 220449) quotes a guide price of $19 million for the estate with its Grade I-listed mansion house set in some 200 acres of formal gardens and parkland with frontage to the River Alde, in-hand and let farms, a farmhouse and cottages, which is offered either as a whole or in its constituent parts.

Although the Glemham family of east Suffolk were already established as landowners in the area from the early 15th century, they didn't acquire Little Glemham until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1540s. According to The History of Parliament (1604-29), Thomas Glemham of Glemham Hall substantially enlarged the estate by purchasing former monastic lands, thereby turning the family into important east Suffolk landowners.

An article in COUNTRY LIFE (January 1, 1910) attributes the building of 'this delightful sample of our Early Renaissance style' to Thomas's son, Sir Henry Glemham, who married a daughter of Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset and Lord High Treasurer, thanks to whose patronage Sir Henry became the first member of his family to sit in Parliament.

He died at Little Glemham in 1632 and was succeeded by his son, Sir Thomas, a career soldier who was described on his death in 1648 as a gentleman of noble extraction and a fair but impaired fortune', which resulted in the eventual sale of Glemham to the North family, later Earls of Guilford, in 1708.