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Photo: John Chapman, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Magnificent "prodigy" house: as Elizabeth I toured the country, nobles vied to create mansions suitable for her and all the courtiers and retinue. This house, created from the dissolved Walden Abbey, did so in 1578. "I know, I'll smash it all down and make a much bigger one" reasoned the Earl of Suffolk. He hosted King James I here, the least he could do since he'd embezzled royal funds to pay for it. Charles II owned it for a time. Over the 18th century Sir John Vanbrugh whittled it down to a third of its sprawl, and this is the version you see nowadays. Capability Brown landscaped the gardens. The "Temple of Concord" seen east is a mock-ruin built in 1791 to celebrate King George III's recovery from insanity, which didn't last long but they kept the "folly".
Audley End House, or Audley End, is an early 17th-century English country house near to Saffron Walden in north-west Essex. The Jacobean house was built by Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Suffolk, on the site of a Benedictine monastery that had been awarded to his grandfather, chancellor Thomas Audley, during the dissolution of the monasteries. Suffolk demolished his grandfather's Tudor mansion and built a house of palatial proportions in which he entertained King James I. The house was bought by King Charles II in 1666, but returned to the earls of Suffolk in 1701. Originally consisting of two courts, much of the house was demolished in the 18th century, leaving it about one-third of its original size. The house came into the possession of the Barons Braybrooke at the end of the 18th century and remained with the family for 150 years.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
2.7-hectare ornamental Dutch garden with a hedge maze, laid out from 1828, and restored to its 1870s heyday.