STOKE PARK STOOD SOUTH OF THE ROAD FROM IPSWICH TO BELSTEAD in the parish of Stoke St Mary, which was within the Liberties of Ipswich. It was described in 1918 as lying ‘upon an easy acclivity rising from the Western bank of the River Orwell, and commands exceedingly beautiful prospects of the scenery along the River Banks’.

The manor of Stoke was held before the Reformation by the Abbey of Ely, and on the Dissolution of the Monasteries passed to the Dean and Chapter of Ely Cathedral. By the early seventeenth century an interest in Stoke Park was held by William Acton, who left it to his cousin, the William Acton who acquired property in Bramford from 1595 onwards. The 1829 edition of The Suffolk Traveller refers to ‘the manor of Stoke-hall, by which word we do not mean the modern house by the church but what is now called Stoke-park’, stating that it was held by Nathaniel Acton of the Dean and Chapter of Ely. A map dating from 1787 shows an unnamed building located near the site of Stoke Park, and one dating from 1801 shows Stoke Hall on the north side of the Belstead road near the church of St Mary near the Orwell. These are presumably the two different buildings to which reference is made in The Suffolk Traveller.

In 1840 Stoke Park was acquired by the Honourable Merrick Lindsey Peter Burrell, a member of a family whose seat since the late seventeenth century had been at Langley Park, Beckenham in Kent. It seems likely that the estate came on the market following the death of Nathaniel Lee Acton in 1836.

Burrell was the younger son of the first Lord Gwydyr who married the eldest daughter of the third Duke of Ancaster (also Lord Willoughby de Eresby), joint hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain, a position which she inherited. Burrell died in 1848, to be succeeded at Stoke by his eldest surviving son, Peter Robert Burrell, who became the fourth Lord Gwydyr, succeeding a cousin in that barony but not inheriting the office of Lord Great Chamberlain, which passed in the female line. He died at the age of 99 in 1909, and on the death of his only son six years later the barony became extinct and the Stoke Park estate was inherited by his granddaughter, the wife of Sir John Henniker Heaton.