Kirby Hall Northamptonshire
Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire is one of the finest and most romantically beautiful ruined Elizabethan mansions in England, a great house of the 1570s built for Humphrey Stafford and subsequently associated with Sir Christopher Hatton, Elizabeth I's Lord Chancellor, whose combination of the extraordinary Elizabethan and early Stuart facade stonework, the partially restored formal garden and the picturesque quality of the well-maintained ruin creates one of the most atmospherically rewarding English heritage sites managed by English Heritage. The house is notable for the exceptional quality of its decorative stonework and the ambitious scale of its conception.
The architectural ambition of Kirby Hall was considerable from the outset, the great hall porch and the entrance court facades demonstrating a sophisticated engagement with the classical architectural vocabulary that reflects the influence of Italian and Flemish pattern books on the Elizabethan building tradition. The carved stone decoration, particularly the giant pilasters of the inner court applied to the façade in a way that reflects the contemporary French influence of Philibert de l'Orme, is among the finest examples of Elizabethan architectural ornament in England.
The formal gardens, partially restored by English Heritage in the 1990s, provide the most complete recreation of a seventeenth-century English formal garden available at any ruined house, the recreated box parterres and the stone garden structures providing context for the ruined house they surround.