Private tour · entry included
Sizergh Castle and Gardens —
a private morning
A great house, a great garden, and one family since 1239
Private tour · entry included
A great house, a great garden, and one family since 1239
Duration
3½ hourshalf day, morning
Gardens
4national fern collections
Collected
9:30amfrom your hotel · back about 1pm
Entry
Includedhouse and gardens
Family home
Since 1239the Stricklands
Where
4 milessouth of Kendal
£459per group · entry included
Check availability & book Choose your date · your party only
Sizergh has been the Strickland family home since 1239, and they still live here. Inside: the Inlaid Chamber, the medieval tower and eight centuries of family history. Outside: a limestone rock garden, four national collections of ferns, a kitchen garden and an orchard of sixty-five apple varieties. Whether you come for the history or the plants, there is more than enough of both.
“We’re so glad we weren’t driving.” Our guests often tell us so.
The A591 past Kendal is quick but busy. Your driver watches the road; you watch the limestone country open out.
Experienced, qualified drivers who know every lane and bend, in every kind of weather.
Entry is arranged before you arrive. Nothing to book, nothing to find.
Most great houses were bought, sold or inherited sideways. Sizergh passed down one family for nearly eight hundred years, and you can feel it in every room.
Four National Collections of hardy ferns, a limestone rock garden that is the largest the National Trust owns, and acers that turn fiery red in autumn. Gardeners come a long way for it.
The Inlaid Chamber's panelling, made around 1580 from oak inlaid with pale poplar and dark bog oak, was sold to the V&A in 1891. It came back in 1999. Few rooms in England have a stranger story.
Vegetables and flowers in the kitchen garden, a 60-metre fruit wall, an orchard of sixty-five apple varieties, many of them northern. What grows here goes to the café.
The grounds are extensive — lawns, woods and paths around the lake — so children can let off steam while the grown-ups linger in the borders.
A café and a shop, and a second-hand bookshop in the barn. Leave time for the books.
Eight centuries in the house. A hundred years in the rock garden. Come for either; stay for both.History and gardens, in equal measure
Tap a place to see it. We collect you from your hotel; the route can change on the day.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
What there is to see, in the house and in the garden.
01
The tower
The oldest part
02
The Inlaid Chamber
The room that came home
03
The ferns
Four national collections
04
The rock garden
Down to the lake
05
The grounds
Room to run
At the heart of the house is a stone tower of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, built when the border with Scotland was close and raids were real. Everything else — the Tudor halls, the Georgian windows — grew around it. You can still read the house as it grew.
Oak panelling inlaid with pale poplar and dark bog oak, made around 1580. In 1891 the family sold the room to the V&A for £1,000, and for a century it stood in a London museum. It came home in 1999. It is one of the finest Elizabethan rooms in England, back where it was made.
The Stricklands stayed Catholic through the Reformation, and after 1688 they followed James II into exile at Saint-Germain, outside Paris. The portraits of the exiled royal family in the house came back with them. A loyal family, on the losing side, for a very long time.
Catherine Parr, who became Henry VIII's sixth and last wife, was related to the Stricklands. After her first husband died in 1533, she is thought to have stayed at Sizergh with Katherine Neville, the widow of Sir Walter Strickland. Nobody can prove it; the family has always believed it.
Built in the 1920s from the local limestone, it is the largest limestone rock garden the National Trust owns, with ferns, dwarf conifers and water running down to the Mirror Lake. In autumn the acers set it alight.
Sizergh holds four National Collections of hardy ferns, among them the royal ferns, Osmunda. They grow in the rock garden, the kitchen garden, the orchard and the Stumpery, opened in 2016, where more than a dozen kinds of miniature daffodil come up among the old stumps each spring. For a fern lover, there is nowhere quite like it.
Vegetables and cut flowers, a 60-metre limestone fruit wall faced with red brick to ripen the fruit, a 50-metre herbaceous border, and an orchard of more than sixty-five apple varieties, many of them northern. Beyond it, the Dutch Garden, long grass and flowers, open April to October. Probably the most peaceful corner of the garden.
The second-hand bookshop is in the barn, and the café cooks with what the kitchen garden grows. Outside, the grounds are extensive — lawns, woodland and the paths around the lake — with plenty of room for children to run.
If you like Sizergh, add another house and garden for the afternoon: our private afternoon tours to Levens Hall next door, with the world's oldest topiary garden, or Holker Hall on the Cartmel peninsula. Two houses and two gardens in one day.
For gardens in the north, on another day, our private tours to Dalemain in the morning and Hutton-in-the-Forest in the afternoon make a full day together.
And at Hill Top, on our Beatrix Potter tours, she had a garden and a kitchen garden too.
This tour can be added to, or adapted as part of, a bespoke tour — tailor-made for each individual booking, around the places and the people you most want to see.
Find out about bespoke toursEvery tour is led by one of a small team of local guides — Tim, Gillian, Sandra and Steve — who live in Cumbria. The team rotates, so we can't promise a particular guide. We are based in Kendal, four miles from Sizergh; our minibuses are licensed for private hire, and we are fully insured.
This page was checked by Phil in .
Photographs via Wikimedia Commons: Keith Evans (CC BY-SA 2.0), The wub (CC BY-SA 4.0), Geertivp (CC BY-SA 4.0), David Dixon (CC BY-SA 2.0), Kevin Waterhouse (CC BY-SA 2.0), Ruth Riddle (CC BY-SA 2.0). Placeholder photography — to be replaced with our own.
