Queen Anne country house set in a landscaped 2,000 acre park, owned by Eudo Dapifer at the time of the Domesday Book.

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.

Tickets £22 including tea, coffee, cakes and biscuits

Access: Gravel paths in places and uneven underfoot. Disabled cloakroom available.

Please see our cancellation policy below:
If you cancel more than two weeks before the tour is scheduled to take place, we will fully refund your ticket money excluding any phone booking fees. If it’s less than 14 days before a tour, for any reason, we regret that we cannot refund your ticket money unless we can resell your ticket(s). If we cancel at any time, we will fully refund your ticket money. Although we make every effort to avoid it, sometimes a tour has to be cancelled at short notice due to circumstances beyond our control. In this case, we cannot accept responsibility for, or refund, any consequential losses, such as money spent on travel or accommodation.