A Special Guest Post by Katharine Edgar: Kentwell Hall, Where Time Travel Dreams Come True.

All photo credits Kentwell Hall and Mike Hill.

Deep in a woodland in Suffolk, a sixteenth century glass kiln blazes. Around the kiln long-skirted women and men dressed in hose carefully heat blobs of glass at the end of long pipes. They blow, turn and shape them until new-made vessels emerge. It is a magical, ancient process. 

Glass blowing 

Not far away a girl hammers brass around a mould, working it to the form of a trumpet, and the rhythmic whir and creak of a pole lathe filter through the green leaves. Chickens scratch about. In the distance comes the sound of a pipe and drum, playing a dance.

Trumpet making 

If you emerge from the woods you will see an imposing red brick Tudor manor house, and if you enter the house you will find it occupied: you will be welcomed in, and can speak with the servants and their gentlefolk, watch the brewing of ale and the churning of butter, smell the baking bread.

Brewer checks the temperature in the copper 

For people intrigued by the Tudors, travelling in time to their world is an impossible fantasy. But at Kentwell Hall the dream comes true. You won’t meet Anne Boleyn: this is no royal palace, but a country manor house not far from the famous half timbered houses of Lavenham. The house belongs to the Clopton family, country gentry who have made their fortunes in the economic powerhouse of East Anglia at the height of the medieval wool trade and whose family connections spread to court.

In actual fact, of course, there are no Cloptons at Kentwell. The house belongs to retired lawyer Patrick Phillips and his wife Judith, and the Tudor folk are volunteers. Patrick bought the house in 1971. This was a courageous act: the house, if not quite ruined, was thought by many to be beyond saving. 

Since then he and Judith have devoted themselves to gently coaxing the building back to life and creating a fabulous garden full of enchantment and curiosity. The re-creations were conceived after the couple visited a historic chateau in France where volunteers wore costumes, but were only pretending to weave, cook and make pots. At Kentwell it would be done for real. They advertised for participants. ‘Live as a Tudor!’ read the notice in the Guardian back in the 1970s. Volunteers learned to make costumes, adopt early modern speech patterns, and began a deep dive into researching and re-learning forgotten past skills.

For several decades, the Tudor re-creations were a staple of school trips for children across south-east England. Easily reachable by road from London and running for three weeks in the summer the events were visited by schools during the week and the public at weekends. 

Clopton ladies take the air 

Changes to the National Curriculum meant that school visits dropped off, but the re-creations remained popular with the public and are now held from spring to autumn, joined by other events including Magic Weekend, Dickensian Christmas and a live scare event for Halloween. The ‘history festivals’, or multi-period re-creations, showcase Kentwell’s characteristic combination of playful inventiveness and meticulous attention to historical detail. |Visitors meet characters from an unexpected range of times from the Neolithic to the 1980s: hunters, Roman soldiers, Puritans and punks.

The largest of the Tudor re-creations will take place this year for a week in late June and two in August. These feature more than two hundred Tudors and are the opportunity to see some of the more spectacular crafts, such as glass blowing, but all the Tudor events feature an astonishing range of sixteenth century activities from archery to alchemy. 

Many members of the public come back repeatedly, returning every year or even several times to the same event. Some volunteers have been coming since the 1980s. What is it that evokes such loyalty in visitors and participants?

For the Kentwell Tudors, it is a chance to be part of a community of creative people of a variety of ages and backgrounds who share the desire to know more about history and yearn to experience the past. They also get to spend time in a place that, with its shimmering moat, can be heart-breakingly beautiful in the dawn silence. Up its three quarter mile lime avenue it stands apart from the modern world.

The modern world, of course, is one where more and more of our lives are digital and the term ‘immersive’ is most often used for an audio-visual experience. But at Kentwell the immersion visitors undergo is a real, sensory one, with no digital projections or laboratory-created chemical scents, let alone anything generated by artificial intelligence. Reality means messiness and failures. Kilns have collapsed and bread burned. Reality means risk, drama, and as every writer of fiction knows, this engages.

1970s camper enjoys Smash and spaghetti hoops 

at a Kentwell History Festival 

Every year the Tudor year is a different one, and this year it will be 1536. The re-enactments will begin with Easter, on Good Friday. At the May Day weekend there will be a mummers’ play (will St George’s dragon breathe fire?) and a chance to join in the dancing. In midsummer and August the glass blowers will discover whether the new kiln they have been building this last weekend works, and by Michaelmas the harvest will be in and the spring lambs grown. The Cloptons might discuss politics. There is a new queen this year. And Thomas Cromwell’s influence grows ever stronger….

Kentwell’s 1536 Easter re-creation runs from 18th - 21st April 2025. 

For further event dates, and to book, please visit https://www.kentwell.co.uk

Katharine Edgar

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About the author

Katharine Edgar first visited Kentwell Hall in 1982. It sparked an interest in history which led to a career teaching Museum Studies at university and writing historical fiction. Her first historical novel, Five Wounds, set in the north of England during the Pilgrimage of Grace, is available on Amazon and her writing can also be heard as part of the immersive (in the modern sense!) Shakespearean Memory Parlour project at https://middlingculture.com. A re-enactor who specialises in textile work, she recently took part in the ‘total immersion’ Candlemas 1461 event at the Weald and Downland Museum with Black Knight Historical, living 24 hours a day in a house with no window glass in the depths of winter. Follow Katherine on Bluesky @katharineedgar.bsky.social and find Kentwell Hall @kentwellhall.bsky.social