The Norfolk manor house that inspired Virginia Woolf

Many English country houses lay claim to literary legacies. Blo Norton Hall, however, has more right than most. In the summer of 1906, while in her early twenties, Virginia Woolf rented the Elizabethan Norfolk manor house with her older sister, artist Vanessa. The seven-mile journey there from Diss station, through isolated countryside, and their arrival at the secluded, moated site made a deep impression on Woolf.

She wrote in her diary: ‘Every mile seemed to draw a thicker curtain than the last between you and the world. So that finally, when you are set down at the Hall, no sound whatever reaches your ear; the very light seems to filter through deep layers; and the air circulates slowly, as though it had but to make the circuit of the hall, and its duties were complete.’

Once settled, in a letter to her friend, Violet Dickinson, Woolf wrote of the hall as ‘300 years old, striped with oak bars inside, old staircases, ancestral vats and portraits.