Braxted Park

Mid-eighteenth-century red-brick house with earlier features built by Sir Robert Taylor for the cloth merchant, Peter DuCane who lived here from 1751 to 1803. A brick wall of four and a half miles surrounds 500 acres of parkland, lakes, the parish church and hermitage.

Braxted Park has been the family home of the Clark family since it was purchased on behalf of the Plessey Company by Sir Allen Clark in 1946. Since that time it has been developed by successive generations of the family into a highly successful and diversified rural business which incorporates five main enterprises: weddings and events, property management, a nine-hole parkland golf course, one of the best partridge shoots in the UK and a productive arable farm.

Braxted Park is not only a beautiful and unusual place. It is also an important feature of the local community and environment and has a vital role to play in terms of local employment as well as heritage conservation. All its businesses contribute to this beautiful estate’s maintenance as one of the jewels in the Essex landscape.

The Hermitage at Braxted Park, formerly known, inaccurately, as the Ice House, is one of the most mysterious and enigmatic lakeside buildings in any English parkland setting. Architectural and garden historians are perplexed by its origins and rarely can agree on its original function. The best guess is that it was some sort of “folly” probably originally commissioned by the first Peter DuCane when he built Braxted Park with Sir Robert Taylor in the late 18th century.

The tour includes the house, the estate grounds and hermitage but not the church.

Tours that are scheduled will be listed below. If none are scheduled yet, please check back later, or find other tours you might enjoy on our tours listing page here.