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About Ingatestone Hall

Today, the North wing provides office accommodation for a variety of businesses while Dominic Petre, the present Lord Petre's son, and his family have a private apartment in the South Wing.

Among the rooms that the visitor will see are:


• The SUMMER PARLOUR, the recently refurbished former ballroom in which teas and light meals are served to visitors and where private dinners or receptions can be accommodated.
• The oak-panelled STONE HALL, created by Lady Rasch to replace the former Great Hall, lost when the West wing was demolished.
• The DINING ROOM with its walls lined with oak-panelling and tapestries.
• The OLD KITCHEN with its cavernous open fireplace.
• "MY MASTER'S LODGING", the principal bedroom, with its four-poster bed.
• The QUEEN ANNE ROOM in contrasting 18th century style with pine rather than oak panelling.
• The 29 metre long GALLERY lined with 40 portraits of successive generations of the Petre family and containing displays of memorabilia accumulated over the centuries.
• Two secret PRIESTS' HIDING-PLACES concealed within the thickness of the walls.

The orchards that almost entirely covered the GROUNDS in Tudor times have disappeared but a few features from those days remain - the high boundary wall and the walled garden where summer al fresco picnics were enjoyed, the stew pond and the avenue of ancient lime trees that borders it and the cistern in the Old Orchard in which until very recently, spring water was collected to supply the house.

 

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