About Thorpeness
Thorpeness is part of the parish of Aldringham cum Thorpe and is within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB.
The village was originally a small fishing hamlet in the late 19th century, with folklore stories of it being a route for smugglers into East Anglia. However in 1910, Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie, a Scottish barrister, who had made his money investing on the Russia Railways, bought the entire area from north of Aldeburgh to past Sizewell, up the coast and inland to Aldringham and Leiston.
Ogilvie developed Thorpeness into a private fantasy holiday village, to which he invited his friends and colleagues families, during the summer months. A country club with tennis courts and a swimming pool, a golf course and clubhouse and many holiday homes were built in Jacobean and Tudor styles.
Thorpeness remained as a mostly privately-owned village by the Ogilvie family for 3 generations, with houses only being sold from the estate to friends as holiday homes. In 1972, Alexander Stuart Ogilvie, GS's grandson, died on the Thorpeness Golf Course, and many of the houses and the golf course and country club were sold to pay the government's Death Duties.
