The Stately Homes of Norfolk - Felbrigg Hall

[Music] described as one of the most elegant country houses in East Anglia Philbrick Hall is truly a hidden gem the Hall is a place of surprises and delights a mixture of opulence and homeliness and the rolling landscape park with its 500 acres of woods and trails is a great place to explore the last squire of filbrick Hall died in 1969 and left the house its contents and the entire estate to the National Trust and so today we can go in and discover the history in the delights that this house holds for every visitor hello welcome to fabric or this has been part of the trust since 1969 where it's be close to buy the last square Robert wins I'm Kevin Kramer and this is his portrait just over here we have over a hundred thousand visitors here through the house each year and this is one of the first rooms that they come into which is the Great Hall mm-hmm that's quite magnificent isn't it I'm what are these structures on the ceiling he's made to look like plaster fortunately they are made out of wood William Howe Winton was very inspired are coming back from the Grand Tour he loved Italy and I think he came back is very much inspired by what he had seen the stained glass in this room I come from a nice and Peter Bancroft church in Norwich and a lot of them actually date back as far as the 16th century as well early 16th century in the mid 19th century an interesting story that took place here was that one of the owners unfortunately called mad Wyndham fell in love with a local courtesan Agnes Willoughby his uncle was greatly concerned at the amount of money that he was spending on her and also the amount when he is spending in general and he was worried that he would lose his inheritance and so this provoked a large court case to check the sanity of mad Wyndham but he was actually declared sane however he had to pay over 20,000 pounds for the fees and therefore he lost the estate and the estate went to some rich merchants up-and-coming merchants from Norwich and they were the cattiness [Music] after the great Horace we move into the dining room which is the first of three reception rooms followed by the drawing-room and then the cabinet as well and these rooms are set out as they would have been in the mid 19th century I can see here that each individual person has got their own menu as well they do this style of dining was referred to as a la francaise and this is where the second and third courses were on the table at the same time and the food would have been passed around much like the way that we dined today at a party so they would have put the main course and the dessert on the table at the same time yes unusually so the alternative would have been an a LaRue style of dining which is where armed servants would have come probably from behind the screen and would have come through with a hot plate and given the course and the food as and when it was required as well that was the more fashionable style of dining but Norfolk being a little bit further away from fashionable firm circles took a little bit of time to catch up with the festival way of doing things [Music] so hey we threw into the drawing room are one of the larger reception rooms on the ground floor it contains a fabulous ceiling by Edward Gooch who conveniently also dates on there at 1687 there are a number of fantastic paintings in this room including one of the portraits of the last owner another William Windom William Windom three and two paintings by Samuel Scott as well one of the Tower of London and of old London Bridge before the great fire so tell me what this room is here here this is the cabinets and this is where the owner William Windom would have wanted to take either his closest friends all the people he wished to impress the most we have five cabinets within this room including a mid 18th century black oriental cabinets on a mahogany stands as you can see quite a number of drawers so lots of opportunity for the owners puts our prized possessions in there any sort of personal artifacts letters anything brought back from holidays mementos and including this - lockable sections as well so anything particularly private or secret that the owner might want to put away this furniture is is also from that period as well a little bit later actually but still the mid sort of 19th century and still as it would have been enjoyed by the owners here at fabric it's magnificent round table as that and oak it's a rosewood rosewood one of the rooms that fell break that every visitor ought to have a look at is the beautiful library in its current setting from 1750 to where it houses a large number of books brought back from the Grand Tour so as you can see we have over 5,000 books in this room and they range from philosophy and literature to land management and agriculture including some actually rather quirky books and there's one in particular that I wanted to show you this book here arm was first published in 1593 and this details are Venetian a court dress including this courtesan where if you I'm just flick up here underneath you've got some wooden blocks I'm so obvious being quite deceptive about her height mm-hmm we are fortunate enough to have some of dr. Johnson's very own books within this library including our early editions of his dictionary dr. Johnson was our very good friends with one of the windows willing went in the third in the late 18th century but as you can see these two versions are in excellent condition and they're very much prized possessions within this library [Music] so Richard you've been involved in quite a few projects here and you're taking me down to see one now yes we're just going to go and have a look at the lake and the work we've been doing just to the north of it as part of the high-level stewardship grant we had received monies from the government to improve the lake area north of the lake that we can during the winter flood for the valley so the valley of the scarab Xtreme which flows into the beer is at this point at least reconnected with its floodplain which is proving really popular with wild fowl and wading birds so this is the Bund yes and this that serves what purpose it acts as a dam so there's a sluice underneath here that we can if you looked at an arrow notching we can place wooden planks across that and raise the water level so that we can flood this whole area at will and this will flood sort of right back to pretty much where the cows are we're getting quite large numbers of teal and widgeon here and actually for the last couple of winters there's been a bitten for a couple of months or so in the reed bed here which is really nice we're not only doing this for us we're improving the water quality downstream [Music] gardening is definitely a 365 day of the year process this time of year is almost the easy time of year because it's a simple stuff it's weeding it's pleasurable stuff I actually find weeding enjoyable there's lots of weeding deadheading planting grass cutting hedge clipping fruit pruning it's a wide variety of work in the winters when we do all our hard work in the winter is when we do project work like we've had a new rose garden that we put in we do things like repair the paths we prepare all the borders we put that 100 tons of mulch down every single year so the hard work is actually all through the winter and unless we've actually got a couple of feet of snow we're actually in the garden all year round I've been here now for about 13 years and over that period we've pretty much revamped the whole garden this kitchen garden that we're standing in right now was mostly fruit trees and on grass so all of the kitchen garden has pretty much been put in by us we've done a succession of winter projects over the years each winter we do different projects so we've worked hard I round all of the borders we've extended to her border we've introduced a ribbon border we've done a hot border and in the main more ornamental parts of the garden we've completely redone the borders so the balls have been the old plants were all taken out and have all been replanted and they've been replanted in a way that kind of reflected the spirit of the place in the sense that the the captain's who lived in this house on this property in the 19th century were very experimental with planting and plants because there's a very small area of formal garden around the house they use the wool gardens an extension of their pleasure ground which is really quite unusual so we had some really exotic plants in here and we took that theme and we've kind of run with him so in parts of our garden you see God you see plants that you normally see in places like Tresckow or you see you down in the West Country they're very unusual for up here so we've had an enormous amount of fun in the garden which is rare for a National Trust garden because quite often it's about history integrity and maintaining that here with it's been we've had a lot more freedom and it's been good for us because we can reflect current trends for example not using pesticides using modern varieties of vegetables that people can see and then grow at home and responding to climate change although what climate change means has changed over the last 13 years but we've gone for a lot of drought tolerant plants and maybe slightly more tender plants that you wouldn't normally expect to see up here so it's given us a great deal of freedom [Music] so there we are beautiful filbrick Hall set in 1,700 acres of magnificent North Norfolk countryside I think you'll agree there's something here to see it's these magnificent walled gardens with the beautiful flowers tended by Tina and her team also within the house with the furniture the architecture and the paintings and of course all the work that's being done on the estate by Richard and his team I hope you've enjoyed this visit [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Chris Bailey Presents

Views: 25,270

Rating: 4.9483204 out of 5

Keywords: Norfolk, National Trust, Felbrigg, jacobean, architecture, Orangery

Id: LNDSazJDMps

Length: 12min 0sec (720 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 30 2019