Treasures of the east

A Whig power house is only one of the many jewels in East Anglia

- Penny Churchill

TODAY’S COUNTRY LIFE sees the launch onto the open market, for the first time in its history, of Grade I-listed Wolterton Hall and its surrounding, 458-acre Wolterton Park estate near Itteringham, in north Norfolk’s picturesque Bure Valley, four miles from Aylsham, seven miles from Holt and a stone’s throw from the sublime north Norfolk coast. For sale at a guide price of £25 million through Tom Goodley of Strutt & Parker in Norwich (01603 883607) and Mark McAndrew in London (020–7691 2214), Wolterton Hall is one of north Norfolk’s four great Whig ‘power houses’— the others being Houghton Hall, home of the Marquess and Marchioness Cholmondely, Holkham Hall, home of the Earl and Countess of Leicester, and Raynham Hall, the seat of the Townshend family for almost 400 years.

Wolterton Hall was built between 1722 and 1742 by the diplomat and parliamentarian Horatio Walpole, 1st Baron Walpole of Wolterton, whose family had been established as landed gentry in Norfolk since the 14th century. He was the younger brother of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, who inherited the 17,000-acre Houghton estate in 1700 and appointed his friend and royal architect Thomas Ripley to oversee the construction of Palladian Houghton Hall, where the first stone was laid in May 1722.

Horatio already owned a house at Wolterton, which burnt down during building works, and he was persuaded by Ripley to replace it with a grand country house designed in the Palladian tradition. Work began in earnest in 1727 and was completed in 1742. In the early 1800s, the Palladian steps leading to the Marble Hall were replaced by a porte