Dowsby Hall

The the architect John Thorpe is believed to have drawn up a design for a house for Sir William Rigon shortly after he was knighted in 1603.

Thorpe had trained in the Royal Office of Works and is famous for the Thorpe Album in Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Only half a dozen or so of his houses are still standing.

‘The house of twenty chimneys’ was originally twice its present size, with a main entrance and staircase in the centre and a symmetrical south range, and, on the top floor, a long gallery where the family could look over the extensive views across the then undrained fens.

The house is said to have been reduced to its present size when it became a farmhouse in the late 18th-century. More recently it was the home of Henry Burtt, the farmer who had the idea for 'The Archers'.