Eastern promise

These three East Anglian houses include a medieval moated manor once owned by the inspiration for Shakespeare's Falstaff, the home of a sculptor and a converted watermill

- By Penny Churchill

ENCHANTING Hempnalls Hall, a moated manor house in mid Suffolk, is for sale for the first time in 23 years. The Grade II-listed dwelling is set in 10 acres of gardens, woodland, paddocks and flower meadows, three-quarters of a mile from the ancient village of Cotton and seven miles north of Stowmarket. Approached down the long, winding Willow Lane, Hempnalls Hall stands on a rectangular wooded island surrounded by a medieval moat thought to date from the 12th or 13th century.

Matthew Cutting of Jackson-Stops in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk (01284 700535), quotes a guide price of £1.95 million for the late-16th-century manor house built, according to its Historic England listing, on two storeys with an attic and a small, 1½-storey rear wing, which replaced an earlier range that predated the present main house. Substantially restored in the 1980s and again by the current owners, it boasts a fine, 16th-century, crow-stepped redbrick gable end to the right, with a plain-tiled roof and a left gable end of a later date. Timber-frame and mainly plastered, the front elevation boasts fine panelled plasterwork of the 1980s.

A well-researched history of the site compiled by the present owners traces Hempnalls' origins to Domesday, when the manor of Caldecota was held by Robert Malet. By 1367, it was held by the knightly de Hemenhale family, from whom the present house takes its name. Hempnalls Hall was probably the birthplace in 1396 of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, who served in Henry V's campaigns against France, became a trusted general of Henry VI and married Chaucer's granddaughter. In the mid 1400s, the manor was acquired by Sir John Fastolf of Caister Castle, model for Shakespeare's Falstaff, who spent a fortune on the upkeep of the estate and manor house. Fastolf was succeeded at Hempnalls by his cousin and rival, Sir John Paston, author of some of the Paston Letters, several of which were reputedly 'written at Hempnalls by candlelight'.