Lullingstone Castle

The manor of Lullingstone appears in the Domesday Book of 1086. In 1279 it was acquired by Gregory de Rokesley, who served eight terms as Lord Mayor of London, and it passed down the Rokesley family for several generations before being sold to the Peches. Sir John Peche, High Sheriff of Kent for 1494–95 and from 1509 joint Lord Deputy of Calais, began the present manor house in 1497. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn were regular visitors.

Of the two gatehouses that once stood here, the outer survives; the inner was demolished in the 18th century. Built in the late 16th century, the outer gatehouse may rest on earlier foundations laid by Sir John Peche, which would make it potentially one of the first in England built entirely of brick.

In 1543 the estate passed by marriage to Peche's nephew, Sir Percyvall Hart, chief steward and knight harbinger to Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. Between 1543 and 1580 he built the red-brick, three-storey house as it now stands, then called Lullingstone House; traces of his 16th-century work survive in the north and east fronts. He died in 1580, and in May 1603 his grandson Sir Percival Hart sent fish and poultry from the Lullingstone estate to King James at Theobalds.

A later Percival Hart, High Sheriff of Kent in 1706, remodelled the house — the two-storey Queen Anne entrance front is his work and Sir John Dixon Dyke's — and renamed it Lullingstone Castle. He left one daughter, Anne, who married in turn John Bluet and Sir Thomas Dyke, carrying the estate towards the Hart Dyke family who have lived here for twenty generations.

In 1934 the estate was sold to Kemp Town Brewery, which resold it to Kent County Council in 1938; the Army occupied the estate during the Second World War, and in the mid-1960s Dartford Rural District Council laid out a golf course in the grounds and created a public park. The house itself stayed in Hart Dyke hands. Zoe Dyke created the Lullingstone Silk Farm here — Queen Mary visited, and the farm made silk for the coronation robe of King George VI; the farm has since moved away, but it also produced silk for other royal occasions, including the wedding dresses of Princess Elizabeth and Lady Diana Spencer.

The walled garden, previously a herb garden designed by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, was converted by plant hunter Tom Hart Dyke, the twentieth generation of his family at Lullingstone, into the World Garden of Plants — a project followed by the BBC2 series Save Lullingstone Castle and, in spring 2007, Return to Lullingstone Castle. The garden and castle are open to the public from April to September.