Inside Hever Castle: the Rooms and What Is in Them

Hever is a small castle, and that is the point of it. Three floors, about seventeen rooms, one spiral stair, and a route that begins and ends in the gatehouse the Cobhams were licensed to crenellate in 1383. What follows is what each room is, in the order you meet it.

The Gatehouse, 1383, and the two surviving portcullises

The gatehouse and the walled bailey are the oldest fabric on the site. John de Cobham was granted his licence to crenellate in 1383. The moat, the walls, the towers and the end block all date from that work. A building called Hever Cobham was already here in 1308, but nothing of it survives above ground.

The tour of the castle finishes here rather than starting, which catches people out. The room still holds its garderobe — a fourteenth-century lavatory that emptied straight into the moat — and two of the gatehouse’s three original portcullises survive, the third taken out in the 1830s by Jane Waldo.

The Courtyard and the drawbridge that still lifts

Step out of the gatehouse and the difference in age is in front of you. Fourteenth century stonework on one side; timber-framed Tudor work added by the Boleyns on the other. The front portcullis is said to be one of the oldest working portcullises in the country, and Astor’s reinstated drawbridge can still be raised.

This is also where pushchairs have to be left. From the drawbridge there is one step down to the gatehouse and three more down into the courtyard, and no ramp is possible, so it is where a wheelchair user has to decide.

The Inner Hall — the Tudor Great Kitchen

In the Boleyns' time this was the kitchen. William Waldorf Astor turned it into the Inner Hall in 1905, panelled in Italian walnut to a design by William Silver Frith. The gallery above it is modelled on the rood screen at King's College Chapel, Cambridge. The ceiling is Elizabethan in style and carries the Tudor rose.

The Great Hall, the Boleyn arms and the Minstrels' Gallery

Open to the roof rafters in the fifteenth century. It is also the room the kitchen was moved into in 1838, after the castle's north-east corner collapsed under the weight of a chimney. The linenfold panelling, the ceiling and the fireplace beneath the Boleyn coat of arms are Frith's. Nathaniel Hitch carved the Minstrels' Gallery in 1905.

The Drawing Room, the Library and the Parlour

Three rooms that were service space under the Tudors and reception rooms under the Astors. The Drawing Room was five rooms until 1905 — pantry, larder, dairy and the rest. Frank Loughborough Pearson panelled it in oak inlaid with bog oak and holly, after the Elizabethan Inlaid Chamber at Sizergh Castle in Cumbria.

The Library held the estate's administrative offices. Its sabicu carving is in the style of Grinling Gibbons and its bookcases are copies of Samuel Pepys's own. The Parlour was partitioned off the Great Hall by Geoffrey Boleyn. It is a small, precise example of the Tudor move away from communal living.

The Moat Room and the war years

Recently reopened as part of a ground-floor re-curation, and the one room here that is not about the Tudors at all. It covers the castle's twentieth century: visits from The Times staff, and the Second World War effort. It includes footage shot at Hever in 1943 and held by the Imperial War Museum.

The Nursery and the Best Bedchamber

The Nursery is presented as the bedchamber of the Boleyn children, which is what it most likely was. When Thomas and Elizabeth Boleyn moved here around 1505, Anne and Mary were old enough to share a canopied pallet bed and George was still in a cradle. The story that it was Anne's own room is a seventeenth-century myth, and the castle says so itself.

The Best Bedchamber is where Thomas and Elizabeth would have slept. It is also where Anne most likely stayed when she came back to Hever between about 1526 and 1528, including the summer she spent recovering here from the sweating sickness.

King Henry VIII's Bedchamber, and the doubt about it

The panelling is sixteenth century apart from the section over the fireplace, and the room is traditionally shown as the king's. The castle's own text is careful about it. Henry visited during the courtship, but it is doubtful he ever stayed the night: Hever is small, and he owned Penshurst Place three miles north.

This room and the one next door were probably a servants' dormitory, sitting as they do over the kitchens. It is the most honestly labelled room in the house.

The Book of Hours Room and Anne Boleyn's prayer books

A tower room whose staircase Thomas Boleyn built to give servants a direct run from the kitchen. Astor turned it into an oratory around 1903. It now displays two Books of Hours carrying Anne Boleyn’s own inscription and signature, which are the most specific objects at Hever and the reason a good number of visitors travel here at all.

The Long Gallery: 24 original portraits hung in dynastic order, Henry VI to Henry VIII

Anne of Cleves built the Long Gallery across the full width of the castle in the sixteenth century, over the great hall and the kitchen. It is reached from the Staircase Gallery she added at the same time. It was for entertaining, for exercise indoors and for hanging pictures, which is still its job.

The permanent exhibition runs the Wars of the Roses to the Reformation through 24 original portraits hung in dynastic order, Henry VI to Henry VIII. The panelling is original; the ceiling is an early twentieth-century Tudor reconstruction by Nathaniel Hitch. The windows in its north wall were bricked up to avoid the window tax introduced in 1696, and reopened in 1898.

Three floors, and the stairs between them

The ground floor is one level and holds six rooms before the spiral stair. After that there is one way up, and it is a spiral. Every staircase has a banister rail. The middle and top floors both step up and down between rooms.

The three floors, and the one stair between them

The estate asks for at least an hour inside. The audio guide is included in the castle admission price and comes in English, French, German, Dutch, Russian and Chinese, and it is paced to about that hour. The accessibility page counts every one of those steps, and the gardens are where the other half of a day at Hever goes.

A Hever Castle guided tour runs out to the gate from London. Hever Castle Tours lists every one of them, with what each fare buys and how long it leaves you inside.