Hatfield House

Back Blipping

Our accommodation is close to Hatfield House and Park. Rather extraordinarily I have never been there, so we decided to do that late morning into early afternoon.

This was the site of a royal palace and deer park, Henry VIII had his children live here, and it was here in 1558 that the young princess Elisabeth learnt that her sister had died and that she had acceded to the English throne. Part of the palace she knew still survives, separate from this “new” building.

This building was built for Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury and James I’s first minister. James, Elizabeth’s nephew and the son of Mary Queen of Scots, who succeeded to the English throne in 1603, didn’t like the large palaces, and swapped it for Cecil’s existing house “Theobalds”, also in Hertfordshire (it didn’t survive the Civil War). Cecil set about building a new house, completed in 1611 and magnificently Jacobean. He only survived the completion by one year, but it has remained in the Salisbury family ever since and it remains their home.

We didn’t go in the house (another time) but visited two of the gardens and had a walk around part of the park and woodland down to the dammed section of the River Lea. The park is huge, there is plenty more to explore another time. Public access is for part of the week and part of the year only.

This view is from the east, and gives no sense of the House’s scale. It is most impressive from the south, but that cannot be easily photographed as the public are excluded from that end. They are also excluded from an impressive maze, which is behind me here.

Afterwards we drove 20 minutes and visited Dad.