Knole

Knole was an archbishop's palace taken by Henry VIII and given by Elizabeth I to Thomas Sackville in 1566; the Sackvilles have lived there ever since, and part of the house remains their private home. It is a calendar house by tradition, with 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases and seven courtyards, a claim nobody has verified and which is probably a nineteenth-century invention. What is verifiable is the furniture: the family bought little and threw away less, so the show rooms hold an extraordinary survival of seventeenth-century textiles, silver furniture from Charles II's court and royal state beds acquired as perquisites when Sackvilles served as Lord Chamberlain. Vita Sackville-West grew up here and could not inherit it because she was female, which shaped her life and Woolf's Orlando. The park holds around three hundred and fifty deer.

The main sights

• The seventeenth-century interiors - textiles and furniture surviving in place.
• The silver furniture - a rare set from the Restoration court.
• The deer park - a thousand acres of unlandscaped medieval parkland.
• The Gatehouse Tower - Vita's childhood rooms, opened to visitors in 2018.

When to go

April to October for the house; the park is open free and year-round, and autumn is the rut. Conservation work is continual and rooms close in rotation. Light levels indoors are kept very low to protect the textiles.

Good to know

Interiors are deliberately dim for conservation and some visitors find them hard to see. Part of the house is private and closed. The walk up from Sevenoaks station takes twenty-five minutes through the park.

Nearby

Sevenoaks town is below; Ightham Mote and Chartwell are short drives away.

Key facts