Burton Agnes Hall

[2][3] The plan attributed to John Smythson presents a square block with bay windows and a small internal courtyard.

These include a number of 17th-century plaster ceilings and an alabaster overmantel depicting the parable of the Ten Virgins based on a work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that was disseminated through engravings by Philip Galle, printed in the 1560s by Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp.

[5] The walled flower garden has a games motif with a central chess board played on black and white paving stones.

The Griffiths were a Welsh family who had emigrated to Staffordshire in the thirteenth century and inherited the Burton Agnes estate.

The present Elizabethan house was built nearby in 1601–10 by Sir Henry Griffith, 1st Baronet, after he was appointed to the Council of the North.

[6] The widow of the 6th Baronet married John Parkhurst of Catesby Priory, Northamptonshire, known as "Handsome Jack", who squandered much of the family fortune and neglected the estate.

On the death of the eleventh Baronet in 1899 the house passed to his daughter, who had married Thomas Lamplugh Wickham, and who had adopted the additional surname of Boynton.

On her death it passed in turn to their son Marcus Wickham Boynton, who operated a successful stud farm on the estate for many years and was High Sheriff of Yorkshire for 1953–54.

He died in 1989 and left the property to a distant cousin, Simon Cunliffe-Lister, then aged twelve, grandson of Viscount Whitelaw and son of the 3rd Earl of Swinton.