BRAMFORD HALL STOOD ON HIGH GROUND ONTHE WEST SIDE OF THE GIPPING VALLEY four miles north-west of Ipswich. It stood in an estate of 1,235 acres and was one of the numerous properties which in the absence of male heirs passed through marriage to the family of Broke of Nacton. Sir Percy Loraine whose mother was a daughter of Captain Charles Acton Broke, was the last member of the family to own Bramford.

In 1595 William Acton, a clothier from Ipswich, acquired Beverlies and other manors in the parish of Bramford and in 1612 the manor of Bramford itself. His son John (who was born in 1587 and was High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1631) purchased further lands in the parish. John Acton is said to have erected the original house in the 1630s and it became the seat of his family whose last male heir was Nathaniel Lee Acton, who inherited Livermere Hall near Bury St Edmunds in 1768. On the death of Nathaniel Lee Acton in 1836 Bramford Hall and its estate passed in turn to his two sisters, the second of whom was the widow of Sir William Fowle Middleton Bt of Shrubland. After the death of their son, Sir William Fowle Fowle Middleton, in 1860 the property passed to his nephew, Sir George Nathaniel Broke Bt, and thereafter to Sir George's niece who married Rear-Admiral Sir Lampton Loraine Bt. Family papers indicate that in Victorian times the house was mainly let to tenants. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one of these tenants, Major-General J. C. Russell, commissioned a series of photographs of the house and estate. These survive and provide a fascinating insight into life on the estate at that time.

Sir Lampton Loraine died in 1917 and his widow became a tenant of her son Sir Percy, a distinguished diplomat who was British Ambassador in Turkey and later in Rome and on whose behalf the estate was managed, the Hon. John Henniker (of Thornham) being the agent. After Lady Loraine’s death in 1933 her daughter, Isaura, remained at Bramford until 1937. It appears that she was the last member of the family to live in the house.