Culford Park

Culford Park in Culford, Suffolk, England, is a country house that is the former seat of the Bacon, Cornwallis and Cadogan families, and now it is the home of Culford School.

History of the Park

From at least 1429 the Coote family had lived at Culford and in 1524 Christopher Coote was lord of the manor. In 1540 Culford was granted by the Crown to the Bacon family and in 1591 Sir Nicholas Bacon built a red-brick hall on the same site as the present house. The estate passed to the Cornwallis family in 1660 and during the middle of the C18 'T Wright' (possibly Thomas Wright (1711(86), the nationally renowned landscape gardener) was employed. Wright produced a map of the park dated 1742 which shows a formal landscape of avenues, rides and vistas, through geometrically shaped blocks of woodland. Between 1790 and 1796 Samuel Wyatt was commissioned to remodel the house for the first Marquis Cornwallis and in 1791 Humphry Repton (1752-1818) provided advice on landscaping the park, preparing a Red Book in 1792 (Williamson 1993). The estate remained in the Cornwallis family until the second Marquess died in 1823, by which time it had been greatly extended. Culford was sold the following year to Richard Benyon De Beauvoir and an estate map of 1834 shows the major expansion of the designed landscape on all boundaries. From circa 1839 the Rev Edward Benyon continued to embellish the estate. In 1889 the estate was sold again, this time to the fifth Earl Cadogan who commissioned the architect William Young to remodel the house in the Italian style. New stables were built, the gardens were altered and considerable additions made to the village.

Following the death of the sixth Earl in 1933 the estate was sold. The core of the park, together with the house, became the home of Culford School (bought 1935) in whose hands it remain today.

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Coordinates: 52°18′03″N 0°41′21″E / 52.300921°N 0.689156°E