Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Old Walton Hall, Chesterfield
The present Walton Hall, built in the closing decade of the 18th century as a fairly substantial farmhouse, nowadays survives entirely surrounded by modern housing, its lush farmlands lost to a succession of extractive industries followed by the SW expansion of Chesterfield, which gobbled the unpretentious village of Walton up towards the close of the 19th century – and didn’t stop.
The site, however, is an ancient one, held by an otherwise unknown man called Hardulf at the time of the Norman conquest, and from him, doubtless compromised by supporting or fighting on the losing side at Hastings, it came into the hands of the King. Who the King’s tenant was at Walton, we seem not to know, but by the next generation it was in the hands of Roger le Brito, otherwise le Breton.
Roger, whose name suggests Breton origin – a good number of William the Conquerors comrades-in-arms were Bretons – is otherwise thought to be identifiable with Roger, son of Steinulf, the Domesday Book tenant of Calow, but as the name Steinulf is Nordic not Breton, this may not be a tenable supposition. However, whilst Calow descended amongst more easily attested descendants of Steinulf (bearing the name Calow, of course), Walton descended to the posterity of this Roger.
His grandson, Sir Robert le Breton, received a licence from the king to found a chantry on his land at Walton, clearly suggesting he also had a capital mansion there, too. Nevertheless, the family continued for eight generations until Isabella, daughter and sole heiress of another Sir Robert brought the estate to the Lowdhams of Lowdham, in Nottinghamshire. In the next generation another heiress brought it to Thomas, a younger son of the Peakland grandee Sir Thomas Foljambe of Tideswell, around 1390 and his family held it until 1633. The old house was one of many Derbyshire manor houses to host Mary Queen of Scots, in this case, for two nights in February 1568.
The last hall to be occupied prior to the building of the present one was that built by Godfrey Foljambe, who inherited the estate on the death of his father, Sir Godfrey, in 1585, and the existence of two chimneypieces and overmantels bearing his initials and dated 1591 (one was dismantled and reconstructed for installation at Dene Park in Kent; the other came into the hands of Sir George Sitwell but is lost) suggests that his new house was being fitted out in that year and was thus ready for re-occupation, perhaps before the end of the year.
The house’s predecessor was set in a park, bordered on the north by the Hipper and this had a tower therein, which can be picked out on both the map of Christopher Saxton of 1577 and that of John Speed of 33 years later, probably a hunting stand, like that at Chatsworth. The new house is only known from a survey of 1633 by surveyor William Senior, and consisted of an entrance front with end gables, from which ran cross wings, with two further lesser gables flanking the entrance. This ensemble formed a deep courtyard, and was closed at its open end by a timber screen, beyond which lay the stable block. On the other side of the house was the domestic chapel, founded as a chantry by Sir Robert le Breton, by 1623 embellished with a tower, spire and extended chancel.
Sir Godfrey Foljambe, who lived there ‘wherein great contynewall housekeeping was mayntayned’, died in 1595, whereupon his widow, Isabella, was left a life interest in the estate, allowing her to live there with her second husband Sir William Bowes. She outlived him, too, and died in 1623; both were very keen Puritans. In 1609, they had been host to Lady Arbella Stuart, the King’s cousin and Bess of Hardwick’s grand-daughter.
The house by then was surrounded by gardens, orchards, a bowling alley and pleasure grounds extending to twelve acres, the estate itself running to over 2,336 acres. The building itself was described as in good repair. However, once Lady Bowes had died, the male heir, Sir Francis Foljambe, 1st Bt. (the title created in 1622) inherited it. He was MP for Pontefract (his main estate then lay at Aldwarke in Yorkshire) and High Sheriff of Derbyshire in 1633, in which year he decided to sell up and the house seems never to have been properly lived in ever again.
The purchaser was Sir Arthur Ingram MP of Temple Newsham, Yorkshire, a colourful character described by one contemporary as ‘a rapacious, plausible swindler who ruined many during a long and successful criminal career’, but it would seem that his purchase – at an eye-watering £16,000 – may have been an element of some other transaction, for within three years he too had sold the estate, this time to Paul Fletcher, a local ironmaster.
Fletcher’s heir was another local merchant, Richard Jenkinson, who in 1648, with the Civil War still raging, decided that the old house – un-lived in since 1623 and in decay – was too large for him and he reduced it considerably, supposedly to make it more convenient. His son, Sir Paul, was created a baronet (of Walton) in 1685, but the family allowed the building to continue to decay, until in 1713 William Woolley could write of it:
“The ancient seate Walton nere Chesterfield….is utterly ruyned, plucked downe, and sould, no materiall, as ys reported left, nor almost any mencyon made were so greate hospytality, and that in my tyme used.”
With the death of Sir Jonathan Jenkinson, 3rd Bt. in 1739, his niece and heiress inherited it and forthwith bestowed it upon her mother Barbara, widow of Sir Paul, who had died in 1714. By this time, she was married to John Woodyear who, like the Jenkinsons, lived elsewhere and promptly cleared the site of the old hall, in order to convert what was left of the estate (after several parcels had been sold off to local coal-masters) into a working farm.
Hence, the present, ashlar (stone) built, two-and-a-half storey three bay farmhouse, which in fact does incorporate some fabric from its predecessor, and the adjoining barn which is without doubt a vestige of the previous house. The plain-ness of the main façade, bar a sill band to the first floor, suggests a later date in the 18th century, even in terms of a farm house, so a date of c. 1795/1800 would seem the most likely.
As for the estate itself, Woodyear sold it in 1813 to the Hunlokes of Wingerworth (see Country Images for January 2014) but they merely asset stripped the estate further and moved the remainder on to Revd. Richard Turbutt of Ogston Hall, although by 1827/29 Joshua Jebb was living there as a freeholder, although his son Rev. John Jebb built Walton Lodge before 1846 and the hall returned to being a farm house, tenanted by the Grattons and then from the early 1890s the Buxtons, who were there until at least the Second World War.
Michael Stanley and I called in winter 1982 when it had long ceased to be a farm; the last time the house was sold, it was nevertheless offered at £595,000.
