HOBLAND HALL (IN EARLIER TIMES HOBBELOND’S) WAS NINE MILES NORTH OF LOWESTOFT on the narrow piece of land between the North Sea and the River Waveney, an area now in Norfolk but being south and east of the Waveney was historically part of Suffolk. Much of the house was destroyed by fire in 1961.

In the fifteenth century Hobland was owned by Sir John Fastolf, who died in 1459, and it was one of the properties that William Waynflete arranged should become the property of Magdalen College, Oxford. It remained in the college's ownership as an investment property let to a succession of tenants over the intervening centuries until 1938 when it was sold. There is no archival evidence that the college played any part in the building of Hobland Hall or of any previous house on the site, such works normally being the responsibility of tenants whose leases ran for periods of about six years. In 1801 when leased to Thomas Fowler the property was described as ‘all that site of the Manor of Hobland Hall, in the County of Suffolk, with all lands, closures, &c., thereto belonging in Gorleston, Bradwell, South Town, Hopton, and Belton, and formerly in the tenure of John Pitcairn, clerk, Gerrard Trotter, &c’. Twenty years later, when the then tenant John Thirkill became insolvent, the estate extended to about 630 acres.