BOULGE HALL, TWO MILES NORTH-WEST OF WOODBRIDGE, is best known for its association with the FitzGerald family who came to live here in 1835. Edward FitzGerald, the poet and translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, who was born in 1809 at nearby Bredfield House, was its most renowned member.

The house was owned in the first half of the nineteenth century by Mary Frances, daughter of John FitzGerald of Kilkenny. She married Dr John Purcell who changed his name to FitzGerald after the death of his father-in-law. Edward FitzGerald, their third son, was educated at King Edward VI School, Bury St Edmunds and Trinity College, Cambridge, and from 1835 to 1853 lived on the estate at Boulge Cottage. Mrs Fitzgerald died in 1855 and the Hall and its estate passed to her eldest son, John. After his death in 1879 the estate was retained by his executors until it was sold in 1890 to Robert Holmes White, a London solicitor, whose father John Meadows White was a member of a long-established East Anglian family. John White had established himself with his cousin Thomas Borrett in London in legal practice in the 1820s, becoming a Parliamentary solicitor and also solicitor to the Ecclesiastical Commission. Following its purchase by Robert White, Boulge became the home of his son, Robert Eaton White, who became prominent in the affairs of Suffolk and was created a baronet in 1937.

THE HOUSE was built for William Whitby about 1794 but appears to have been substantially recast in the nineteenth century. In 1866 the architects W. G. Habershon and A. R. Pite undertook work to the house said to have cost £800, but what alterations were made is not known. Externally the house had a very Victorian look to it with the windows of the rooms on the garden front being sashed and some of the windows on the entrance front being mullioned and transomed with sashes. The large bay on the garden front and many of the chimneys were typical of the second half of the nineteenth century but other features such as crow-stepped gables may have reflected earlier origins. It was built of white brick with plain tiles and a modillion cornice and was of two principal storeys with dormer-windowed attics.