Burghley House: Tickets, Opening Times, Interiors and Gardens

Burghley House is the largest and grandest surviving house of the first Elizabethan age, and it is close enough to our own corner of Northamptonshire that guests staying at The Barn regularly drive over for the day and are back in time for dinner. Sir William Cecil, Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I, spent thirty-two years and £21,000 building it between 1555 and 1587. His descendants, the Marquesses of Exeter, still live there.

Most visitors come for the state rooms and leave without seeing the Sculpture Garden, which is a mistake worth avoiding. This guide covers what is actually inside the house, what the gardens hold, current ticket prices, and the practical business of parking and timing. Groups taking exclusive use of the estate often build a whole day around it.

Everything below was checked against the estate’s own published information in August 2026. Prices and opening hours change each season, so book ahead where you can.

Burghley House Opening Times and Ticket Prices for 2026

The house and the gardens run on different timetables, which catches people out. The house opens Saturday to Thursday from 10.30am to 4.30pm and closes on Fridays. The gardens open daily from 10am to 5pm, and the wider park is open daily from 7am until 8pm or dusk, whichever comes first.

The main season runs until Sunday 1 November 2026. After that the gardens and the Adventure Play area reopen for two extra weekends, 7 to 8 November and 14 to 15 November, though the house itself stays shut.

Ticket	Booked in advance	On the day
Adult	£22.00	£24.00
Child (3 to 15 years)	£9.50	£11.00
Family	£56.00	£60.00
Adult, Summer Savings rate	£19.25	£21.00
Child, Summer Savings rate	£8.31	—
Family, Summer Savings rate	£49.00	—

Booking ahead saves £2.00 a head on adult entry and £4.00 on a family ticket. That covers the house, the gardens and the Adventure Play area on one ticket. Burghley is run by the Burghley House Preservation Trust, a registered charity, so the money goes back into the building.

Who Owns Burghley House?

Burghley House is owned and cared for by the Burghley House Preservation Trust, a registered charity (no. 258489) set up in 1969 by David Cecil, the 6th Marquess of Exeter. The trust looks after the house, its collections, the gardens, the park and the wider estate.

It is still a family home. Miranda Rock, a granddaughter of the 6th Marquess and a 16th-generation descendant of William Cecil, runs Burghley as House Director for the trust. She lives in the house with her husband, Orlando, and their four children, and took over from her mother, Lady Victoria Leatham, in 2007.

Question	Answer
Who owns it	The Burghley House Preservation Trust, a charity founded in 1969
Who lives there	Miranda Rock, her husband Orlando and their four children
Head of the Cecil family	Michael Cecil, 8th Marquess of Exeter, who lives in British Columbia, Canada
Who built it	William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, between 1555 and 1587
Has it ever been sold	No. It has stayed with the Cecil family for more than 450 years

The title and the house now sit on different continents. Michael Cecil, the 8th Marquess of Exeter and head of the family, was born in western Canada and lives in Victoria, British Columbia, so life at Burghley rests with Miranda Rock and the trust. The house is sometimes written as Burleigh House, but Burghley is the correct spelling, taken from the barony Elizabeth I granted William Cecil in 1571.

Inside Burghley House: The State Rooms, Heaven Room and Hell Staircase

The outside of Burghley is still essentially Elizabethan. The inside is not, and that surprises people. Most of the interiors were remodelled before 1800, so what you walk through is a baroque house wearing a Tudor coat.

There are 35 major rooms, and the visitor route takes in a circuit of state apartments. The two everyone remembers are the Heaven Room and the Hell Staircase, both painted by the Neapolitan artist Antonio Verrio between 1697 and 1699. The walls of the Hell Staircase were finished by Thomas Stothard roughly a century after Verrio worked on the ceiling.

The Bow Room carries wall and ceiling paintings by Louis Laguerre, and there is carving by Grinling Gibbons through the baroque suite. In the Pagoda Room you will find portraits of the Cecil family alongside Elizabeth I, Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell.

The oddest room is the Billiard Room, which displays six oval portraits of the Order of Little Bedlam, a drinking club founded by the 5th Earl of Exeter. The art collection runs to several hundred paintings, a large share of them 17th-century Italian works bought by John Cecil, the 5th Earl, on his travels.

Death duties in the 1960s took a number of important pieces, but the collections are otherwise largely as the family assembled them. There is furniture by the 18th-century cabinet makers Ince and Mayhew, along with silver, tapestry and a substantial holding of porcelain. A Treasury space in the old Brewhouse shows a changing selection each year.

If you are short of time, the Heaven Room is the one to prioritise. It is the room guests at 14 Acres mention afterwards, and it is worth timing your visit so you reach it when the morning coach parties have moved on.

Burghley House Gardens, the Sculpture Garden and Capability Brown’s Park

Lancelot Brown, better known as Capability Brown, worked at Burghley between 1755 and 1779. He laid out the avenues with some respect for what was already there, including plantings that go back to the 16th century or earlier.

His largest single act was the lake. Brown found a seam of waterproof blue clay in the grounds and used it to enlarge an existing nine-acre pond into the 26-acre stretch of water you see now, between 1775 and 1780. It was shaped to read as a meandering river rather than a pond, and it still does. His Lion Bridge cost 1,000 guineas at the time, a little over £1,050.

The Garden of Surprises is the one children ask to go back to, full of water jets and mirrors. The Sculpture Garden sits in the old deer park woodland and changes its installations, so it rewards a return visit. Both the parkland and the gardens are listed Grade II* on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens, while the house itself is Grade I.

Walking the Burghley Estate: The Lake, Lion Bridge and Deer Park

The park is the part of Burghley you can enjoy without buying anything, and it is open from 7am every day. That makes it a genuinely different proposition from the house, which runs to museum hours and museum crowds.

Brown’s 26-acre lake is the obvious circuit. Walk it clockwise from the main car park and the house comes into view across the water at roughly the halfway point, which is the view most photographs of Burghley are actually taken from rather than the front lawn. The Lion Bridge crosses the water at the eastern end.

Fallow deer have been kept in the park for centuries and the old deer park woodland is where the Sculpture Garden now sits. Guests at 14 Acres who want a long walk rather than a house tour often come for this alone, then drive into Stamford for lunch.

One practical point that catches people out: the estate is large enough that the walk from the car park to the house entrance is itself a few minutes, and the ground is uneven in places. Sensible shoes matter more here than at most houses of this type.

The Cecil Family and 450 Years of Burghley House History

Burghley has never been sold. It has passed down one family since the 16th century, first to the Earls of Exeter and, from 1801, to the Marquesses. That continuity is the reason the collections are still largely intact.

Date	What happened
1555	Sir William Cecil begins building, modelling the house on the privy lodgings at Richmond Palace
1587	Building work completes after 32 years, at a cost of £21,000
1697 to 1699	Antonio Verrio paints the Heaven Room and the Hell Staircase ceiling
1755 to 1779	Capability Brown lays out the avenues and redesigns the park
1775 to 1780	The nine-acre pond is enlarged into the present 26-acre lake
1801	The Earls of Exeter are elevated to Marquesses
1982 to 2007	Victoria Leatham runs the house, following her father David Cecil, the 6th Marquess and an Olympic gold medallist
Today	Run by the Burghley House Preservation Trust, with Miranda Rock as House Director

The house was laid out in the shape of the letter E in honour of Elizabeth I, though the north-west wing has since gone. The open loggias that once ran around the ground floor were enclosed in the 17th century. If you have visited Althorp House, the contrast is instructive: both are family homes, but Burghley wears its Tudor origins on the outside in a way Althorp does not.

Defender Burghley Horse Trials 2026: Dates and Where to Stay

The Defender Burghley Horse Trials run from 3 to 6 September 2026. It is one of only a handful of CCI5* events in the world and it fills the park completely, so this is the single busiest weekend of the Burghley year.

Accommodation within a short drive of Stamford books out months ahead for the Trials, which is why a good number of our September bookings come from people attending. From our lodges the drive is about 45 minutes, which is far enough to escape the traffic and close enough for an early start on cross-country day.

Note that the house and gardens keep their own opening arrangements during the event, so if you want the state rooms as well as the horses, plan them as two separate outings rather than one. The park also hosts the Burghley Run for Stamford School and an annual meet for the Cambridge University Draghounds.

Things to Do in Stamford Near Burghley House

Stamford sits immediately north of the park and is one of the best-preserved stone towns in England. It is a market town of roughly 20,000 people with five medieval parish churches, a public school founded in 1532 and a centre built almost entirely from local limestone.

The connection with Burghley is not incidental. The Romans laid Ermine Street straight across what is now Burghley Park before fording the Welland, and after the Dissolution the Cecil family bought up former friary land in the town. If the house takes your morning, Stamford will comfortably take your afternoon.

1. Walk into Stamford Through Burghley Park

There is a walking route from the house through the park and into the edge of the town, and it is the best introduction to both. The Welland was historically the boundary between Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, with the land south of the river known as Stamford Baron, which is why the county attached to Burghley’s address has never been straightforward.

Because the park opens at 7am and the house not until 10.30am, the walk fits neatly into the gap. Park once on the estate for free and leave the car where it is for the rest of the day. The route is level for most of its length, though the ground underfoot is grass and gravel rather than pavement.

Allow about 40 minutes each way at an unhurried pace. Doing it before the house opens also means you arrive at the ticket desk after the first coach party has already gone in.

2. St Martin’s Church and the Cecil Tombs

St Martin’s sits on the Burghley side of the river and holds the monuments of the family who built the house. Seeing the tombs after walking the state rooms puts the whole estate into a different order, because the people become considerably more real once you have stood over them.

It is one of five medieval parish churches in the town, and the others are worth a look if church architecture interests you at all. The Priory of St Leonard, a Benedictine foundation documented by 1082, still has part of its church standing on Priory Road.

Entry is free, opening hours vary by season and by church, and none of them takes long. Twenty minutes in St Martin’s is enough to see what you came for.

3. Stamford Town Centre and the Georgian Streets

The town is built almost entirely from local limestone, which is why it has stood in for period London so often on screen. The streets around St Mary’s Hill and Barn Hill are the ones to walk, and both are short.

Stamford was a walled town and an inland port on the Great North Road, and its wealth came first from wool and later from malting once the Welland was made navigable again in the 1660s. That trade money is what paid for the stone frontages you are looking at.

There are independent shops and a good number of places to eat within a few hundred metres of each other. It is compact enough that you do not need a plan, which is the point.

4. The Burghley Sculpture Garden and Garden of Surprises

Set in the old deer park woodland, the Sculpture Garden is included in the standard ticket and is the part of the estate most day visitors skip entirely. The installations change from season to season, so it is not the same visit twice.

The Garden of Surprises next to it is the one children ask to go back to, built around water jets, mirrors and a series of hidden mechanisms. It is the only part of Burghley designed to be played with rather than looked at.

Give the two of them 45 minutes at least, and more if the weather is warm. Both work particularly well with children who have run out of patience for state rooms, which happens sooner than most parents expect.

5. Stamford Meadows and the River Welland

The Welland runs along the southern edge of the town and the meadows beside it are open grass rather than formal park. It is a few minutes on foot from the town centre and it costs nothing.

This is the easiest place to let children run after a house visit, and it links back towards the Burghley estate on foot if you want to close the loop. The river here is the same crossing point the Danes settled at, being the lowest place the Welland could be forded.

In summer it fills with families from Stamford itself, which is usually the best recommendation a park can have. There is no charge, no gate and no closing time.

6. Rockingham Castle, 30 Minutes South

If you are making a two-day trip of the area, Rockingham Castle pairs well with Burghley and sits roughly halfway back towards our estate. It is a Norman castle turned family home, so it reads very differently from an Elizabethan prodigy house.

The two also share a piece of history. Royalists used Burghley as a defensive position during the Civil War and were besieged there on 24 July 1643, surrendering the following day after a defeat at Peterborough the week before.

Between the two houses you get about 900 years of English domestic architecture in a single weekend. Check Rockingham’s opening days before setting off, as they are considerably more limited than Burghley’s.

More to Explore Near Our Estate

Burghley is one of several big days out within an hour of Clipston. Our guide to things to do in Market Harborough covers the closest market town, and The Loft is the lodge most couples pick for a two-night heritage trip. Larger parties marking an occasion tend to look at our wedding accommodation in Northamptonshire instead.

Image credits: Burghley House west front by Anthony Masi, CC BY 2.0. South Garden by Richard Humphrey and Horse Trials showjumping by Jonathan Hutchins, both CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Official visitor information from burghley.co.uk.