Parham Park

Parham Park
Site of Special Scientific Interest
Location within West Sussex
Area of Search West Sussex
Grid reference TQ059148
Coordinates 50°55′22″N 0°29′33″W / 50.922817°N 0.492407°W / 50.922817; -0.492407Coordinates: 50°55′22″N 0°29′33″W / 50.922817°N 0.492407°W / 50.922817; -0.492407
Interest Biological
Area 263.4 ha (651 acres)
Notification 1965 (1965)
Natural England website
Parham House at the east

Parham Park is an Elizabethan house and estate in the civil parish of Parham, west of the village of Cootham, and between Storrington and Pulborough, West Sussex, South East England. The estate was originally owned by the Monastery of Westminster and granted to Robert Palmer by King Henry VIII in 1540.

History

The foundation stone was laid in 1577 by the 2-year-old Thomas Palmer, and Parham has been a family home ever since. Thomas Bishopp (later Sir Thomas Bishopp, 1st Baronet) bought Parham House in 1601. For over 300 years his descendants continued to live at Parham House Estate until January 1922. Then in 1922 the Hon. Clive Pearson, younger son of Viscount Cowdray, bought Parham from Mary,17th Baroness Zouche in her own right,[1] and he and his wife Alicia opened the house to visitors in 1948, after the Second World War when it had also been home to evacuee children and Canadian soldiers.

The Long Gallery

Off the Long Gallery at the top of the house there is an exhibition which touches on the period between 1922 and 1948, with many family photographs as well as photographs of the building works which took place during that time.

The remains of a Churchill MK2 Tank on Kithurst Hill that was used for target practice by the Canadian troops based at Parham during the Second World War.

Mr and Mrs Pearson, followed by their daughter Veronica Mary Tritton, spent more than 60 years carefully restoring Parham and filling it with a sensitively chosen collection of beautiful old furniture, paintings and textiles, also acquiring items originally in the house. There is a particularly important collection of early needlework. What they created at Parham is a rare survival of mid-20th-century connoisseurship within a major Elizabethan house.

Now owned by a charitable trust, Parham House and Gardens are surrounded by some 875 acres (3.54 km2) of working agricultural and forestry land.

The great Radical Reformer Henry 'Orator' Hunt was buried on Saturday 21 February 1835 in the churchyard of St Peter's Church in Parham Park. The Times published a lengthy report of the funeral.

Deer park

Around the house stretches 300 acres (1.2 km2) of ancient deer park whose Fallow Deer are descendants of the original herd first recorded in 1628. This area had been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest.[2] It has special biological interest for its epiphytic lichen flora, as an area for two rare beetles and its large heronry.

18th-century smuggling

Parham House had connections with an infamous smuggling raid on the Customs House at Poole in 1747 by the notorious Hawkhurst Gang. The body of one of the other smugglers was later found in the pond of the Parham House estate after being dumped there some 12 miles from where he had been beaten to death by his accomplices.

Film location

The 1995 film Haunted by British director Lewis Gilbert was filmed extensively at Parham.[3] It is based on a novel of the same name by James Herbert, who had strong connections to Sussex, residing at the time of his March 2013 death in Woodmancote, West Sussex.

References

  1. ↑ Mary Cecil Frankland née Curzon (1875-1965), 17th Baroness Zouche in her own right, wife of Sir Frederick Frankland 10th Baronet
  2. ↑ "SSSI Citation — Parham Park" (PDF). Natural England. Retrieved 4 April 2009.
  3. ↑ "Haunted(1995) Filming Locations". IMDb. Retrieved 15 June 2014.
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