Now I'm wondering if any of the National Trust's properties or other stately English homes could stand in for the grand house in one of my very favourite Blyton books - Greylings Manor in The Treasure Hunters! Enid doesn't tend to go into finely detailed descriptions of buildings, but now I look back at the book (which I haven't read for a while), she does give us a good basic outline of Greylings Manor. (I only had the vaguest picture of it in my own imagination as a 6- or 7-year-old - growing up in Australia, I'd never seen any kind of stately home in my life! )
We're also told that "The old house glowed red in the sunshine", which suggests it's built of brick, or is otherwise reddish (perhaps red-brown) in colour.The car turned into a drive between two big gate-posts. On the top of each sat a stone eagle....
The car ran up a winding drive and stopped before a lovely old house. It was long and rather low, with very tall chimneys. The windows shone with leaded panes, and the sides of the house came out to form a sunny courtyard, in which walked some white fantail pigeons.
(The Treasure Hunters, chapter one)
Do we know of a real house Enid saw that may have inspired Greylings Manor - or did the description just bubble up from her fertile imagination? Or is there a manor that resembles Greylings near you?