Rise in visitors to 'Batman's house' inNottingham, on a tour of the house that was featured in the movie.

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The Elizabethan country house of the 1580s is located on a hill in the park.The house has two museums: the Natural History Museum and the Industrial Museum.Large-scale outdoor events such as rock concerts, sporting events and festivals can be held in the surrounding parkland, which has a herd of deer.

The original family home was at the bottom of the hill, which made it the architectural sensation of its age.The "startlingly bold" exterior remains largely intact despite much re-modelled inside.[3]

Robert Smythson, an Elizabethan architect, designed Longleat and was to go on to design Hardwick Hall, which was built between 1580 and 1588 for Sir Francis Willoughby.The general plan of the house is similar to the others, but the decoration is distinctive, and it is possible that Willoughby played a part in creating it.The style has early Jacobean elements.

There is a stone screen at one end of the building and galleries at either end.There are many views of the park from this location.From the top floor, there are towers at each corner.Each corner of the house has a square pavilion with decorative features above the roof line.The basement is cut from the rock.[5]

The floor plan is said to derive from Serlio's drawing of Villa Poggio Reale near Naples in the late 15th century.According to Mark Girouard, the design is derived from the reconstruction of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem and the description of Mount Ed in the 16th century.[7]

The building is said to have been paid for with coal from the pits owned by Willoughby, and the labourers were also paid this way.The master masons and some of the statuary were brought from Italy.Some evidence of this can be found in the stone carvings on the exterior walls of the gondola mooring rings.French and Dutch influences are obvious.There is a lot of carved decoration on the hall and exterior.The upper floors of the central block have a window tracery that looks back to the Middle Ages.[8]

After a fire in 1642, the house was unused for four decades before it was re-occupied and given a new look.The ceilings of the two main staircases and the walls of one are believed to have been painted by Sir James Thornhill and Louis Laguerre around 1700.Wyatville carried out re-modelling intermittently until the 1830s.The hall has a fake hammerbeam wood ceiling which is supported by horizontal beams above, but not needed for decoration.The roofs of Theobalds and Longleat were similar to the earlier ones.[9]

There is a pipe organ in the main hall that is thought to be from the end of the 17th century.The hand still blows it.An admiral of the Willoughby family is said to have taken a daily bath in a well and associated tank beneath the hall.

Sir Hugh Willoughby was the most famous explorer produced by the Willoughbys, who died trying to get to the North East in 1554.The land is named after him.

The house was still owned by the head of the Willoughby family, but it was too close to the smoke and busy activity of a large manufacturing town.10

The hall opened as a museum in the late 19th century.In 2005 it was closed for two years and re-opened in 2007.The public can visit the prospect room at the top of the house and the kitchens in the basement on escorted tours.A small charge is made for the latter, which lasts about an hour.

Key scenes from The Dark Knight Rises were filmed outside.The latest Wayne Manor featured The Hall.The Hall is five miles north of the city of Gotham.There are no comments at this time.