User:Kaliforniyka/Narford Hall

Narford Hall is an English country house in Narford, Norfolk. The house was built in the late 17th- and early 18th-century for Andrew Fountaine, a politician and art collector, and improved by his son Sir Andrew Fontaine.

It was built in carrstone and ashlar by. The house was greatly enlarged in about 1830, and has a ...



The construction of Narford Hall was begun in June 1702 by Sir Andrew Fountaine, who settled in Norfolk in 1690. Sir Andrew died in 1706 and construction was completed under the direction of his son, another Andrew. Knighted in 1699, he was Vice-Chamberlain to the Prince of Wales and successor to Isaac Newton at the Royal Mint. As a well-established and well-connected collector of works of art, the formal gardens he laid out around the house in the early C18, depicted on a plan by Colen Campbell in 1725 and a series of drawings by Edmund Prideaux of the same period, appear to have been at the forefront of fashion. The geometric layout included groves, walks, and avenues decorated with classical details, the main south avenue extending out of the gardens for c 1.75km to a terminal classical arch. Sir Andrew Fountaine died in 1758 and the formal landscape was gradually deformalised over the course of the C18. By 1789 the Hall was surrounded by a small park which replaced the formal pleasure grounds although the northern basin and canal and the southern avenue were retained. In c 1830 another Andrew Fountaine made substantial enlargements to the Hall and added a stable courtyard to the north-east. In the same decade James Grigor visited the site, noting in his Eastern Arboretum (1841) the range of tree species surviving from the formal landscape and recording that the lake, 'already of great extent' was 'now being enlarged'. By 1891 (OS) the lake, known as Narford Lake, covered c 18ha and the park had been extended to the west. The Fountaine family continued to live at Narford into the C20 and the park remained heavily treed until at least 1946. Since that time parts have been put under the plough and some trees have been lost. The site remains (1999) in private ownership.