Blickling Hall

There was a manor at Blickling long before the present house. In 1452 the estate was bought by Geoffrey Boleyn from Sir John Fastolf, the fifteenth-century knight who is generally accepted as the inspiration for Shakespeare's Falstaff. The Boleyns made it their home, and it is traditionally said that Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second queen, was born here – though the exact date and place of her birth are not recorded, which is why the claim is always hedged. Anne was executed at the Tower of London on 19 May 1536; her brother George was executed in the same affair.

The house you see today is the work of Sir Henry Hobart, a lawyer whose career culminated in 1611 in his appointment as Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. He bought the run-down estate in 1616 and employed Robert Lyminge, the architect of Hatfield House, to build an ambitious family home on the remains of the Boleyns' house. Unusually, Hobart insisted that Lyminge keep the medieval moat and incorporate parts of the old Tudor fabric; the main building work is dated to around 1619–20, and the result is one of the finest Jacobean houses in England.

Blickling passed down through the Hobart and later the Kerr families for four centuries, gathering portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, watercolours by Humphry Repton and a library that grew from the novels of Caroline, Lady Suffield, in the early nineteenth century to the working books of the last owner. He was Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, a Liberal politician and diplomat, who died in 1940 and left the house and the whole estate to the National Trust.

Blickling's reputation rests partly on repetition – Anne Boleyn's coach is one of the most-told ghost stories in England – and partly on the steady drip of reports from people who work there. When the National Trust polled its properties for the most haunted, Blickling came top, and the Trust has been happy to talk up its ghosts. Reports of a Grey Lady floating through walls appear in several published accounts, alongside the usual country-house repertoire of footsteps in empty rooms and the sense of being watched.

The Anne Boleyn story itself is old and widely retold, and its shape – the headless coach, four headless horses, the head in the lap, the vanishing at the door – is remarkably consistent from one telling to the next. Sir Thomas Boleyn's bridge-crossing penance is recorded as local Norfolk folklore, and the tale of Sir Henry Hobart's screams follows a real death after a duel in 1698. The Fastolf sightings are the most loosely described and probably owe as much to the Falstaff connection as to any witness.

A fair sceptical note: nobody has produced a photograph of the coach, the house is a large, old building with the creaks and draughts that implies, and the 19 May tradition guarantees that expectant visitors are on the drive every year. The National Trust presents the ghosts as heritage rather than evidence. That said, the estate does not discourage a little shiver at dusk on the anniversary.

Blickling Estate is a National Trust property near Aylsham in north Norfolk, 1.5 miles from the town on the B1354 and signposted off the A140 Norwich to Cromer road. The house is typically open from midday to late afternoon, with the gardens, shop and cafés open daily from morning and the parkland from dawn to dusk; check the National Trust website for current times and admission, which is free for members. Four pay-and-display car parks serve the estate, with Blue Badge spaces. Inside you will find the famous library and the Gainsborough and Reynolds portraits; outside, 55 acres of garden with a parterre, a lake and a walled kitchen garden, and the Stables Café and Muddy Boots for coffee and cake.

The house has stairs and uneven historic floors, so check the access guide if you need step-free routes. There are no formal ghost tours, but the estate runs seasonal events and 19 May draws its own crowd. Best of all for ghost-hunters, you can sleep on the estate: the National Trust lets seven holiday cottages at Blickling, including a traditional thatched cottage and the iconic tower with views over the parkland, sleeping up to eight and generally available April to October. Aylsham, Norwich and the north Norfolk coast offer plenty more places to stay.