Lost Houses – Sutton Scarsdale
The Arkwright family always did things in a big way. After all, was not Richard Arkwright junior – the cotton entrepreneur Sir Richard’s only son – called the “Richest Commoner in England”? Young Richard had six sons and four had estates bestowed upon them, on which to put down roots, the exceptions being Richard, the eldest son, who pre-deceased his father, and Peter, the third son who took over as heir to Willersley Castle the house built for Sir Richard and finished by the younger Richard. The rest – Robert, John, Charles and Joseph – were settled respectively at Sutton Scarsdale, Hampton Court (Herefordshire), Dunstall Hall (Staffordshire) and Mark Hall (Essex), all with rather large houses, of which Mark Hall has been demolished and now lies beneath Harlow New Town. Robert Arkwright (1783-1859), the second son, had the most splendid house, which was probably why he forebore to step up as heir to Willersley rather than his younger sibling Peter. He and his wife, the actress Fanny Kemble, settled at Sutton Scarsdale, which had passed from the last Leake Earl of Scarsdale to the Clarkes of Chesterfield and had been sold to Arkwright by their ultimate heir, the 1st Marquess of Ormonde KP, in 1824. Robert managed to outlive his eldest son, Maj. William Arkwright of the 6th Dragoons by two years, and was succeeded by his grandson another William, who was barely a month or two old when his grandfather died. The house and estate were therefore vested in the infant’s uncle Godfrey for life, and reverted to young William in 1866 when Godfrey died. Although only seven, William had an elder sister, Emily Elizabeth who, in 1874, married William Thornhill Blois (1842-1889), brother of Sir John Ralph Blois, 8th Bt., and they were settled in a large house half a mile to the west of Sutton Scarsdale, at first called Sutton House but later Sutton Rock, on the estate, just in Duckmanton parish. It is not clear exactly when Sutton Rock was built, but it seems likely to have been erected specifically for Emily and William Blois and the architecture certainly looks the date – c. 1874-5. It was described in the directories of the time as “…a beautiful residence a short distance from Sutton Hall, built by William Arkwright Esq.” It was a rather grand but conservatively styled two storey house with a first floor sill band and a matching plat band below. It was stone, built of ashlared blocks of coal measures sandstone, probably Rough Rock from local Wrang Quarry. It had originally had an East (entrance) front of three bays, widely spaced, with the central one containing the entrance under a portico of paired Ionic columns. Above it was a window with Corinthian columns from which sprang the segmental head with prominent keyblock, flanked by paired matching pilasters supporting the entablature that ran right round the house with a modillion cornice above, a low parapet and a hipped roof behind. There were skinny Corinthian pilasters at the angles, too and the sashed plate glass windows were all set in stone surrounds with entablatures. The south front was also of three bays, but with a narrower central one and paired sashes near the SE angle to light the drawing room. The expansion of the Blois family (there were to be a total of four children) seems to have been the trigger for the enlargement of the house. This seems to have been done either whilst building was still in progress or not very long after completion, for another bay was added on to the entrance front at the North end in exactly matching style, but slightly recessed from the remainder. This wrapped round the north side taking in a substantial service wing, although lower, and having a glass roof lighting a substantial gallery which must have been de-commissioned before the house appeared in the 1919 sale catalogue, where it fails to get a mention. This wing also acquired a second staircase of a dog-leg type, whereas the main one was in the centre of the house, top lit and of cantilevered Hopton Wood stone with an elaborate cast iron balustrade. That the extension was an afterthought is clear from the asymmetry it bestowed on the entrance. Had the additional accommodation been initially intended a Classical design of this type would surely have been adjusted to give a measure of symmetry. The garden front may have been completed contemporaneously with the extension, though because it ran the full width of the extended building, and consisted of a recessed centre with a single bay of paired windows flanked by slightly projecting pairs of bays at the ends. The recessed part also boasted an arched loggia. The interiors were very plain, but there were nevertheless, nine bedrooms and four reception rooms two of which measured a generous 22 by 17 ft. The stables, coach house and offices were situated to the west, running E – W of the pleasure grounds suggesting that the house replaced an earlier one of late 18th century date – or incorporated parts of it. Unfortunately, it is quite unclear who designed the house; it is too pedestrian a design to have been by a London man, so perhaps Thomas Flockton of Sheffield or Giles & Brookhouse of Derby might be suggested. Blois and his wife lived there until his death in 1889 aged forty eight; his widow and their four sons had moved out by 1891, when the house was let to A. W. Barnes, who seem to have been in residence only for about four years before it was taken over by Scots aristocrat Charles Edward Stuart Cockburn JP (1867-1917), grandson of Sir William Cockburn of That Ilk, 7th Bt. His name suggests that his father, at least, was a dyed-in-the-wool Jacobite sympathiser! He married Lilian the daughter of Sir Morton Manningham-Buller, 2nd Bt. of Capesthorne in 1894, which is probably when he, as the sub-agent to the Arkwright estate, moved in.
Lost Houses – Potlock House
Potlock – the name derives from Old English ‘potte’ (depression) and ‘lacu’ (stream) has had a long history. The site is crossed E-W by one of Derbyshire’s two Neolithic cursus monuments, huge communal enterprises of unknown utility, which are today only visible as crop marks and, in the case of this one, as a geophysics reading in places. A bronze age settlement, which sprang up near it, lasted until the period of the English settlements in the 7th century AD, when it was replaced by a new settlement further away, itself deserted in the Middle Ages. Potlock emerges onto the pages of history in the Domesday Book as part of the large manor of Mickleover, originally granted by Wulfric Spot to Burton Abbey around 1002, taken by the Conqueror in 1066 and returned to the monks by 1086, when the book was complied. We know from other sources that Potlock, with land at Willington and Findern was then held by Humphrey de Touques, otherwise Humphrey de Willington or de Chebsey, a Norman sub-tenant of the Abbey. His sons were the crusader Geoffrey de Potlock who held Potlock, later deemed a manor in its own right, with its mill by the Trent and John de Willington of Willington, ancestor of the family of that name. Geoffrey’s offsprings included Humphrey de Thoca, ancestor of the Toke family, who held Potlock, Anslow (Staffs.), Sinfin, and part of Hilton, and another Geoffrey, ancestor of a family called de Potlock. Dr. Cox, in his four volume Derbyshire Church Notes tells us that the manor lay either side of the Trent, the larger part, to the south, having been granted by the Findern family to Repton Priory, the family having retained the northern part, on which lay the manor house and “close to it”, the chapel of St. Leonard. He also tells us that the chapel was first endowed by John de Toke in 1323 with a chaplain, house and 14 acres, and that the Finderns, who inherited Potlock from this John by marriage, used Potlock Manor as their principal seat, rather than that at Findern. This as all fine and dandy as far as it goes, but the Burton Chartulary clarifies matters. The manor did lie on both sides of the river, but the islands there were granted separately to the Abbey by Ralph Gernon, Earl of Chester during the civil war or Brother Cadfael’s war, as readers of the detective stories of Ellis Peters might prefer to term it (1135-1154). They were then granted to the Tokes. The chapel was actually founded by around 1210 when a chaplain (un-named) is mentioned, and in 1255 a charter sets out the terms under which, it was to be maintained in some detail. John de Toke in 1323 was merely confirming what had been a going concern since at least 1200, probably longer. One odd thing is the dedication (not mentioned in the charters): St. Leonard was usually reserved for leper colony chapels, like Locko, Derby and Burton Lazars (Leics.). Could there be more to be learnt about this chapel, which from all accounts appears principally to be that pertaining to the manor house? The Finderns bought back the chief lordship from William, 1st Lord Paget, who in 1546 had obligingly purchased all the Burton Abbey lands from his monarch. They probably rebuilt the old manor house, which without much doubt had been built around a central courtyard (this is how what was then left of it appeared on the 1781 Enclosure Award map). They were not a notably wealthy family, probably contented themselves with rebuilding the south range (as being the sunniest) endowing it with perhaps a new great hall, lit from high up fairly deep windows. From the death of Michael Findern in the earlier 17th century, though, the estate passed to the Harpurs of Swarkestone, if Judge Richard Harpur hadn’t already bought it fifty years earlier when he married Michael’s great aunt and ultimate heiress (as it turned out). In either case, as a manor house it had become redundant after the tenure in the 1670s of John Thacker, a son of Godfrey Thacker of Repton Hall. By this time, it is generally agreed that the chapel had been despoiled or ruined; the village had probably vanished earlier, in the Black Death. The end of the Finderns inevitably led to the reduction of the house to become a tenanted farm. This may have involved the demolition of its older ranges, or their conversion into farm buildings and the division of the great hall horizontally to make two storeys, where one had been previously. It would further appear that the Chapel had gone entirely; its raison d’etre, its usefulness as a domestic chapel, would have evaporated anyhow. Only Chapel Close, lying between the site of the Manor house and the Trent, south of the road, remains, although it is said that the foundations, visible in 1805 when the last vestiges of the Manor were cleared away, could be clearly seen from the air in the dry summer of 1976. We are told that the old house was destroyed by John Glover, who described himself as a gentleman and had been its Harpur tenant (no doubt with the support of the estate). It was replaced by a very pleasing five bay two storey house with a central break-fronted pediment containing a delightful ogiform Gothick light. It was of brick and covered with Brookhouse’s Roman Cement, manufactured on The Morledge, Derby. The rear was much plainer and may also have contained earlier work, left over from the Medieval manor house. There seems to be no record of the interior. A peculiarity of this delightful house, latterly pale pink washed, was that the two storeys to the west (left) of the entrance were typical of 1805 in being half-height first floor over full-height ground floor, but that the remainder was of two storeys where the first floor was actually higher than that below. Now this arrangement is
Lost Houses – Stainsby House
Any reader who thinks I might have run out of substantial lost country houses to describe by now will be, I am afraid, mistaken. I may have been seduced into writing about some modest ones, but more substantial casualties are still unrecorded in this series. One of them is Stainsby House, Smalley, seat of the Wilmot-Sitwell family. In The Derbyshire Country House (3rd edition 2001), I described this house as ‘remarkably large and incorrigibly unlovely’ and I feel that I can stand by that assessment without demur. One always expects Classical country houses to be symmetrical, but Stainsby was anything but. Stone built of finely ashlared Rough Rock from Horsley Castle quarry, the entrance front, which faced approximately North, had a recessed, wide, three bay three storey centre flanked on the left by a two bay wing which was built slightly forward of the centre and which extended by a further three bays to the west but of only two lower storeys. To the right was a much longer four bay wing, also breaking forward, and the two projections were joined by a ground floor loggia centered by a pedimented Ionic portico. There were quoins at the angles, a top parapet and grooved cornice. As if that wasn’t enough, the south (garden) front had a regular three bay pedimented centre, flanked by two bays either side set slightly back, although the attic storey to the right had three lights, whilst that to the left only two. The east portion ended with a full height canted bay, but this feature was absent from the west end of the façade, which stopped abruptly with the lower three bay two storey part seemingly tacked on and set back a little further. At the west end, too, was a sort of pavilion wing with five bays facing west, beyond which was the coach house and stable court with a high arcaded lantern, probably the handsomest part of the entire building. The origin of the house and estate are equally complex. A part of Smalley came into the hands of the Morleys of Morley but, by c1250 it had come to William de Steynesby, a member of the family of Steynesby from the village near Hardwick we now spell Stainsby, and it is thanks to him that the estate acquired that name. His grandson, Sir William de Steynesby died c1300 and from him it somehow became the property of the Sacheverells of Hopwell about 1601. Because the estate was rich in coal, it was extremely valuable and was sold on again to George, second son of George Mower of Barlow Woodseats, whose name in the context of Stainsby is more often spelled More. In 1629, aged 21 he married Mary daughter of Robert Wilmot of Chaddesden. With his son also George (died c1705), he exploited the coal. The second George More died without surviving issue when the estate was again sold to a Heanor mining entrepreneur John Fletcher (died 1734), whose newly granted (1731) coat-of-arms was a riot of mining implements. He probably built the core of the later house, being the wide three bay three storey centre portion. Indeed, the Mores’ house must have been a much more modest affair, taxed on only three hearths in 1670. Fletcher’s son married the eventual heiress of the Smalley Hall estate (which went on his death to the eldest grandson). The youngest grandson , John Fletcher, inherited Stainsby. With his death without issue, it came to his sister, married to Francis Barber of Greasley, Notts, who like all the other families involved, were coal owners. The estate then passed to Francis’s son John (1734-1801), who lived amongst the family’s Warwickshire coal mines at Weddington and allowed his mother to remain in the house until her death. He is notable as a friend of John Whitehurst and was the inventor of the gas turbine. When old Mrs Barber died the estate was sold, through a middle man called Samuel Buxton, to Edward Sacheverell Wilmot, a grandson of Robert Wilmot of Chaddesden Hall, Derby who had married Joyce, the heiress of the famous Whig politician, William Sacheverell, whose extensive estate included that of Morley. His aim in acquiring the estate was to unite the two portions of the original Morley family holding, half of which he had already inherited from the Sacheverells. Another Sacheverell heiress had conveyed a third portion of the estate to the Sitwells of Renishaw and George Sitwell’s heiress Elizabeth, had left it to him in her will, obliging him to assume the surname and arms of Sitwell in addition to Wilmot. He seems immediately to have set about enlarging the house by adding the projecting wings, presumably in view of their irregularity in separate building campaigns, although the four bay one may originally have been narrower. Whatever additions had previously been made to the Fletchers’ house is beyond our ken, but it may have dictated the disparity in size of the projecting bays and the strange placing of the attic windows on the garden front. Whether he had an architect – Thomas Gardner of Uttoxeter built in this plain monumental style in the 1790s locally – or used a local builder we do not know. The new owner died in 1836 whereupon his son, Edward Degge Wilmot-Sitwell decided on a rebuild which Charles Kerry claims was done in 1839, including having the house ‘refaced and restored’. This seems to have included the west extension, the entrance front arcaded loggia and the canted bay on the right of the garden front. It may also have included the Main Road boundary wall with its strange conically roofed bastions and Gothick gateway, along with the expansion of the right hand bay of the entrance front as well. As it would seem likely that any scheme of rebuilding would have surely included a matching bay to the left of the garden front, one is of the opinion that the alterations were actually set in train by Wilmot-Sitwell senior
Lost Houses – Wheston Hall
I realise that knowledgeable readers will read this heading and exclaim that Wheston Hall is not a lost house at all and still stands. Yet the rather mauled remnant which survived the collapse of much of the fabric in a gale in 1952 is largely a new house which made ingenious use of some surviving parts of the original. In truth, the house was never a modest affair and although we have no idea what it originally looked like before the 18th century, the house that emerged from a thorough rebuilding in 1726-1727 does provide us with some clues. The earliest person of some standing to have been recorded as living at Wheston was Thomas Browne in 1362. We do not have much information about him, although it would be safe to assume he held some royally-appointed regulatory post relating to lead extraction. After that there is a lacuna of over a century before we encounter Thomas Alleyne there, whose wife Elizabeth may well have brought him the estate at Wheston, in which case she may have been the Browne heiress. Thomas himself was the third son of John Alleyne of Stanton-in-Peak, descended in all probability from Robert Alyn of Winster living in 1277. The elder branch of the family continued at Stanton Woodseats and elsewhere in Stanton for many generations. Thomas’s son Thurstan was Bailiff and Receiver of the High Peak and by his wife, a Garlick of Glossop, was progenitor of the Alleynes of Wheston along with junior branches at Derby and Loughborough. The family grew rich in the unpredictable business of lead extraction and trading.Sometime in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, but before 1592 when they were fined for Catholic recusancy, they appear to have built a new house. A substantial fragment of this house remained embedded in the building that fell in 1952. It was a rectangular tower house of carboniferous limestone rubble brought to course with millstone grit long-and-short quoins, similar dressings to the mullioned windows with cranked hood moulds and for the string courses. It was at least three storeys and may have had a gabled top, like that surviving at Cutthorpe Old Hall, or parapeted like a larger version of North Lees in Hope, not so far away. A similar tower house is thought to form the core of the hall at Great Longstone too. In photographs of the main façade of the house it can easily be identified as the left hand projection, with its much more irregular quoins, asymmetrical window spacings and greater dimensions than its right hand counterpart. Behind it latterly, was a jumble of near-irreconcilable fragments, extraordinarily difficult to interpret. The Alleynes were Catholics and adherents of the Dukes of Norfolk, at that time major landowners in the Dark Peak and also major investors in the lead trade. The house may have been again rebuilt, in order to enlarge it, in the years preceding the Civil War, for the very striking baroque façade put on in the 1720s strongly suggests that a second tower was probably built with an intervening perhaps gabled range, with two stair towers inwards from the end-towers which probably featured crenelated tops like those at Wingerworth Old Hall and Barlborough Old Hall, both seemingly designed by John Smythson (of Bolsover Castle fame) or someone closely associated with him. Soon after this, the family divided into two lines and it is possible that the house was also divided with both families living under one roof, a common compromise at the time. With two staircases, the house was certainly suitable for division. Yet early in the 18th century, both branches failed virtually simultaneously and half the property, along with its lead-rich estate, passed to a kinsman, Thomas Alleyne of Loughborough (a scion of the Derby branch of the family) and half to the two daughters and co-heiresses of the other Alleyne branch. Of these, one was married to a Fleetwood and the other to a wily Sheffield attorney, Thomas Freeman. He set about uniting the estate in his own person, elbowing Thomas Alleyne aside on the grounds of his Catholic faith and likewise neutralising Fleetwood, whose mother was a Catholic Eyre of Hassop. Freeman thereafter set about modernising his new seat at Wheston, unifying the building with a new Georgian façade which receded in two stages from the corner pavilions to incorporate the old stair towers and culminating in a centrepiece of two bays flanking a rather inconsequential and marginally off-centre entrance; the visual strength of the remainder, marked only by an oeil-de-boeuf on the parapeted upper storey. A pair of Baroque gate piers marked the entrance from the road, topped by pineapples (long a symbol of welcome) flanked by an ornamental timber fence on a dwarf wall. The anonymous person who designed this clearly had flair, but probably lacked formal architectural training, as he would have made much more of the centrepiece. Probably it was an experienced builder recruited from Sheffield. If so, his hand can be seen elsewhere in the Peak, at Winster Hall (c1715), Shallcross Hall (1723-35) and certainly at Norton House, Norton (1733) as all share characteristics of Wheston. Unfortunately we have no record of the interior, but no doubt it had some pretension, as witness accounts of the saloon at Winster. Freeman also laid out an avenue from the front door into a small park that he formed from his own land, ending in a further pair of gate piers, although today the avenue has mainly long gone and few trees survive from the avenue itself which is now is a narrow wall-flanked lane. When Thomas’s son Robert died unmarried in 1763, the property passed through heiresses of the Charltons and then the Maxwells of Meir, Staffordshire, who let it, as did the Dukes of Norfolk to whom the house and estate were eventually bequeathed about two centuries ago. The Duke made it the home of the agent for his White Peak estates, John Allen but in 1827 sold it all to the 6th
Lost Houses – The Field, Litchurch
In its declining years, this suburban Regency Villa was known merely as 237 Osmaston Road, Derby on the thoroughfare of the ancient pre-Roman route south of Derby towards Swarkestone Bridge. This was a place which in the early 19th century was still extremely rural; one has the description by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) of the fields surrounding the home in which he grew up, in newly-built Wilmot Street, as testimony to the bucolic character of the area. Here in Litchurch, which was absorbed by the Borough of Derby in the 1880s, stood Joseph Strutt’s ‘summer villa’ the pleasure grounds which in 1840 he gave to the Borough as the Arboretum and it was just to the east of the Arboretum that the next earliest villa was built, sometime in the early 1820s. This was The Field. Although it has been demolished for some fifty years, it has not been previously chronicled, but surely deserves to be. It was never the town residence of a landed family, but the spacious residence of a number of prominent Derby families. Before it was demolished it was listed Grade III, which was the lowest grade, later abolished, with all surviving Grade III buildings being either promoted to Grade II or relegated to the Local List. The house was originally of three by three bays, two storeys high, and constructed of ashlared blocks of Keuper sandstone from Weston Cliff on the Trent, rather than the ubiquitous Roman Cement of other contemporary villas. Clearly the person who commissioned the house was making a statement about the state of his bank balance! The centre bays all the main fronts broke forward slightly under a low parapet in a very restrained Neo-Greek manner. It was architecturally sophisticated too, with the floor heights of the ground floor greater on the south and east fronts and at the entrance front, where the hall ran right through house to dog-leg staircase under two depressed arches, ceiling heights were lower giving a more spacious feel to the master suite above. The service wing was to the north, although later an extension beside the entrance and incorporating part of it, was added to provide an extra reception room. On the east side an almost free standing top-lit billiard room was built on much later in the 19th century. The interior focused on the long hallway, the layout closely resembling that at Leaper’s Highfields, the space being broken into three sections divided by depressed arches supported on pilasters and decorated with egg-and-date plaster moulding. The cornices were all of ornamental modillions and the main reception room was stuccoed in French Baroque manner, like the Headmaster’s study at The Pastures and Parkfield House (also lost) on Duffield Road. The dog-leg staircase had an ornamental cast iron balustrade, undoubtedly made by the Derby foundry of Weatherhead, Glover & Co in Duke Street. They probably also made the cast iron sliding jalousies which once protected the windows but were removed in the 1942 scrap metal drive. The grounds were originally fairly extensive and landscaped, declining towards a small lake just west of London Road, although as the 19th century went on chunks were disposed of to provide housing. Indeed after the construction of a further pair of villas the street was lined during the 1840s and ‘50s with well-proportioned brick terraced housing, the Arboretum proving a draw for those wishing to live in the style then referred to as genteel. Yet the down side for the occupiers of The Field must have been the erection of the Union Workhouse (now the Royal Crown Derby factory) on the meadow opposite. The building is firmly attributable to an amateur architect, Alderman Richard Leaper, the third son of William Leaper JP (1713-1784) a banker in partnership with a kinsman, Robert Newton of Mickleover. Leaper’s father had served as Mayor of Derby in 1776-1777 and in 1753 had married Sarah Ward, sister of Archer Ward, also on the bank’s board and a keen Baptist. Richard, born in 1759, was educated at Derby School, becoming a brother of the Corporation in 1790 and elected Mayor in 1794-95 then an alderman shortly thereafter. He served as Mayor again in 1807, 1815 and 1824, by which time he was, like his father before him, also a partner in the bank. He lived initially at 59 Friar Gate, Derby but after 1817 at a house of his own devising, Parkfield Cedars, Kedleston Road (also regrettably a lost house), which bore many features in common with The Field, where he died, unmarried, in 1838. As an architect, the Derbyshire historian Stephen Glover, who knew him, averred (writing in 1831) that he “has had great taste and much experience in building family mansions…” going on to a number of other houses he had designed. The building dates lies somewhere between 1819 and 1824 and the client was Francis Severne, a manufacturing jeweller with premises in Corn Market. On his death, his son Henry moved over the road to build Ashtree House and The Field (then called Litchurch Field) was sold to silk manufacturer, Henry Boden of Ednaston Lodge (1807-1862), whose wife was the sister of Sir John (‘Brassy’) Smith. He later moved to The Friary and let the house to the Midland Railway’s eminent engineer William Henry Barlow FRS (1812-1902) who lived there until 1857 when he moved to London to design St Pancras Station and the main line from Derby. His successor, John Sidney Crossley, another civil engineer, occupied the house thereafter until around 1871 when Alderman Sir Abraham Woodiwiss (1828-1884), a multi-millionaire railway contractor acquired it. He probably added the NW extension (done in brick and stuccoed over, hence the rendering of the remainder of the street front to unite, visually, the disparity) and the billiard room. He served two consecutive terms as Mayor, in 1880-1 and 1881-2, but moved to another Leaper House, The Pastures in Littleover, around 1880 and died there, leaving his son Abraham, junior (1852-1912) in residence at The Field; he
Lost Houses: Littleover Old Hall
There is still a Littleover Old Hall standing in our leafy Derby suburb, as any member of the community would be only too pleased to inform you. Yet the house that now acts as the centrepiece of the HQ of the Derbyshire Fire & Rescue Service, hemmed in as it is by utilitarian modern buildings, is a building of 1891, erected to the design of Alexander MacPherson for businessman Edward MacInnes. Prior to that however, there was a house of some architectural pretension on the site that dated to the late Elizabethan era, of which few are aware. Littleover was never a separate manorial estate, but was part of the great manor of Mickleover, as was Findern and the deserted medieval village of Potlock. It had all been given to endow the Abbey of Burton by its founder, the Saxon thegn Wulfric Spot in 1002. By the 14th century though, much land in Findern, Potlock and Littleover had been in the tenancy of the Fynderne family since the early 12th century. In the 16th century, an opulent lawyer of Staffordshire family, Sir Richard Harpur, married Jane daughter of George Fynderne of Findern, thereby acquiring some land at Swarkestone in the settlement, subsequently purchasing much more of that family’s property both there and elsewhere, including an estate at Littleover and the Manor of Breadsall Upper Hall. When the last member of the Fynderne family died without issue, Sir Richard’s wife became the heiress, so he also acquired the remainder of the family’s estates, including Findern and Potlock. Sometime in the 1580s, Sir Richard’s second son, also called Sir Richard Harpur (whose 1635 monument is still to be admired in the parish church), was granted the Littleover estate by his elder brother on his marriage 1588 to a daughter of Thomas Reresby of Thryburgh in Yorkshire. It was probably him who built a house there around the the mid-1590s and presumably there was a previous house on the site, in which he lived beforehand, but of it we know nothing at all. The Harpurs flourished at Littleover until the senior male line died out with 32 year old John Harpur in 1754. His sister had married Samuel Heathcote, a Jacobean Derby alderman and successful lead trader. His descendants lived there until a grandson inherited The Pastures, a newish house situated further west along the Roman road to Burton-on-Trent. They let the old hall as a farm, retaining it and much of the estate after moving to Raleigh in Devon in the 1840s. Yet they only sold the hall in 1890 and the residue of the estate in Littleover and nearby in 1920. Indeed, it was this release of land in the village which enabled it to expand over the following two decades. What was the house like? We only have a limited number of clues. One is the hearth tax assessment of 1670, which records that Richard Harpur (Jr) was assessed for this tax on ten hearths, which suggests a house of medium size comparable with the manor houses at Locko, Duffield Park, Barton Blount and Weston-on-Trent, only the last of which survives in anything like the form it had in that era. We also have two paintings, one ostensibly of 1873 and another done about 15 years later, both of which show the building after major changes had taken place. Finally there are pieces of written evidence: inventories, legal documents and a few descriptions. Of the latter, the earliest is that of William Woolley (c1713) who unhelpfully said that it was ‘a large old house’, whilst James Pilkington described it as a fine old house in a ‘high and pleasant situation’. William Hutton, writing in 1791 was more critical. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘can be said in favour of this house except its antiquity: but everything may be in favour of its situation, which is charming beyond conception.’ The Lysons in 1817 call it a ‘good old mansion’ and inform us that Bache Heathcote was still living in it. The 1873 picture, which still hangs in the house today, was copied from an original (marked ‘after J. Rolfe 1873’) which was presumably in the possession of the Heathcotes. The question here is whether the house shown was as standing in 1873 or as it was when James Rolfe painted it, probably c1820. As the 1880’s painting shows a brick two storey Regency farm house with no towers and contemporary maps, a house with a footprint which was a simple rectangle, one has to assume that the painting is of the house as it was rather than in 1873; this must be the date of the copy. What the picture shows is a house in transition, from a glorious Elizabethan swagger-house to workaday farm. From the original build remains two square castellated three storey towers, lit by tiers of three light mullioned windows and embellished by a pair of tall brick Tudor chimney stacks. One tower boasts a quoined Gothic door in the base, which I cannot believe is in its original position, but could have been a fragment of the Medieval house, retained out of sentiment. The house may originally have sported two further towers on the north side and each may have been capped by a domed lantern, as at Dodington in Lincolnshire, essentially a mark two Hardwick, by Robert Smythson in 1600. It gives a flavour of what Littleover would have looked like, especially as its parapets would probably also have been crenellated. Originally the entire building would have been of three storeys, the rooms of the uppermost one higher than those below, as was then the fashion. An illustration of Wingerworth Old Hall (demolished in 1723) also gives an impression of the sort of house we are looking at but of only two storeys. The only surviving house which gives one some impression of what Littleover would have looked like is Holme Hall, near Bakewell of 1636. The structure behind the towers in the picture, however, appears as
