Stephen Proctor finished his house in 1611, an example of the late Elizabethan style influenced by the great architect Robert Smythson. The plan was austere and symmetrical, the elevations theatrical - bay windows stacked in tall vertical compositions, a great hall lit by tracery windows. Even before completion, Fountains Hall was already a stage for royal drama. In July 1604, the future Charles I - then a small boy travelling south from Dunfermline Palace to London - stopped at Fountains Hall. According to Proctor, the visit was disrupted by his neighbour Sir John Yorke, who was feuding with him. The exact nature of the disruption is lost, but the image is vivid: a future king, a rural feud, and a house still smelling of mortar and quarried abbey stone.

Proctor died in 1619. His widow Honor moved out, and Fountains Hall passed first to the Messenger family, then 150 years later to William Aislabie of neighbouring Studley Royal. The Aislabies preferred their own estate; Fountains Hall became redundant, leased to tenants, parts of it sliding into use as farm storage. The 1928-1931 renovation rescued it as a country retreat. The Duke and Duchess of York - later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth - stayed often as guests of Lady Doris Vyner. When war came in 1939, the hall took on a more humble role. Queen Ethelburga's School evacuated from Harrogate to the Studley Royal estate, with Fountains Hall serving as the school's sanatorium. The stable block became dormitories; one corner became the school chapel where the Archdeacon of Ripon said Sunday Evensong for children far from home. The Vyners themselves lost both their children to that war - Charles, a Royal Naval Reserve pilot, missing in action near Rangoon; Elizabeth of the Women's Royal Naval Service, dead of encephalitis at Felixstowe. A sculpture by the stone steps remembers them with an epitaph by John Maxwell Edmonds.

After the war, the hall fell back into dilapidation. The National Trust acquired the entire Fountains Estate in 1983 from North Yorkshire County Council. Restoration has been patient, layered work - some rooms returned to museum display, others divided into flats including a holiday let. Visitors can see the oak-panelled stone hall and an exhibition room; plans continue for the chapel. The house has also become a familiar face on screen. Its facade played Baddesley Clinton for the 1603 priest-hunt sequences in the 2017 BBC miniseries Gunpowder. Some exterior shots for the 1993 adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden were filmed here too - fitting, since the surrounding water gardens at Studley Royal are themselves a hidden world of follies, cascades, and Cistercian ghosts.

Few country houses share a postcode with a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Fountains Hall does. The Studley Royal Park - water gardens, follies, neoclassical temples, and the ruins of Fountains Abbey - earned World Heritage status in 1986 for the unique synthesis of medieval monastic ruins with 18th-century landscape gardening. Standing at the hall's entrance and looking down the valley, you see Stephen Proctor's revenge against time: his house built from abbey stones, the abbey itself still standing in skeletal magnificence half a mile away, the Georgian water gardens threading between them. The balcony at Fountains Hall has been closed to the public for years - the staircase is considered unsafe - but the view across the valley needs no balcony to be unforgettable.