The Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Kirk Hallam

by Maxwell Craven

Kirk Hallam was originally a small hamlet atop the ridge that overlooks the Nut Brook and the homonymous canal as one travels east towards Little Hallam and Ilkeston. It takes its name from the Old Norse hallr (= a hill) + kirk (= church) which perfectly describes the settlement, even as it appears on the 1880 OS map, on which there is little to be discerned bar the church, the hall and a scatter of houses to the south of the main road. It is thought that the ‘Kirk’ element was added in the early 12^th century as the later settlement that became West Hallam expanded, to differentiate the two. 

In 1066, the manorial estate was held by one Dunstan, but two decades later, when Domesday Book was compiled, it had come into the hands of Ralph de Burun, one of the great barons and few chief lords holding land in Derbyshire and, under him it was held (so later charters establish) by a family taking their name from the place. 

In 1155, Hugh de Burun of Horsley Castle, the last of his line, died and the estate passed via his daughter Aelina to Peter de Sandiacre, son of a Viking called Toli, who not only held Sandiacre, but a great amount of property in Derby, too. His son, another Peter, married Beatrice de Hallam, a member of the family that were Peter’s sub-tenants at Kirk Hallam, and we can only presume that they had a capital mansion of some description there.

From maps, we know that the later hall lay just slightly SSW of the ancient church of All Saints, and it would be reasonable to assume that the ancient manor house would have been on or very near the same spot. As with one of two of the other lost houses we have looked into, it was never the chief seat of the family that owned the land, so always ranked as a secondary residence. Furthermore, in 1260 John de Sandiacre granted the patronage of the church and much of his estate at Kirk Hallam to the Abbey of Dale, so whoever lived in the manor house was from the later 12^th century, a tenant of the Abbot and Canons there.

In fact,  the generous John de Sandiacre died shortly after his gift to the Abbey, in 1277, leaving two daughters and co-heiresses, of whom one carried Sandiacre and Kirk Hallam to her husband, John de Grey, a younger son of Henry de Grey of Codnor. The estate remained thereafter with the great English baronial house of Grey until it was bestowed upon the daughter and co-heiress of the last de Grey who brought it to John Leake of Hasland in 1409.

Yet, once again, the manorial estate had fallen into the hands of a fairly grand, but definitely upwardly mobile, family with a primary residence elsewhere, this time at still extant Hasland Manor House. They also inherited Sutton Scarsdale from the de Greys, too, and the family had also married another heiress, that of the d’Eyncourts of North Wingfield, so they found themselves, by the time of the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, very rich and well endowed with estates, in Derbyshire particularly. 

The Leakes later built a great house at Sutton Scarsdale and Sir Franics Leake, made one of the very first baronets by James I in 1611, added a hunting lodge nearby called Staveley Hagg, which survives as Hagg Farm. He also aggrandized Sutton Scarsdale, and found much favour with Charles I, who made him 1st Lord Deincourt (the title chosen from his antecedents the d’Eyncourts), a favour he returned by great loyalty to his sovereign during the Civil War, for which he had his estate compounded by Parliament as a ‘delinquent’. The impecunious King rewarded him with an earldom for his pains, and he became 1^st Earl of Scarsdale in 1645.

We have no information about the manor house at Kirk Hallam through all this time, and it may have decayed through neglect, as we saw at Chellaston. However, the Leakes got their estates back at the Restoration, and the 1670 hearth tax records a house assessed on five hearths at that time, split between a father and son, both called William Blunstone, and it seems likely that the elder was then the tenant.

Indeed, the Blunstones were long lived in that area, having come from Sandiacre – probably co-incidentally – at the beginning of the 17^th century. However, another William Blunstone was farming in Kirk Hallam in 1827 and his family were still there a generation later, but by then at Ladywood Farm as copyholders, rather than as tenants of the Hall. One wonders if any descendants still live in the area.

Meanwhile, their feudal masters had been going from strength to strength until, that is, the time of Francis Leake, 4^th Earl of Scarsdale, who managed to blow the family’s considerable fortune, mainly through the expense of building a vast new house (but incorporating parts of its predecessor) at Sutton Scardsdale, designed by Francis Smith of Warwick in 1724 (see Country Images May 2021). Having completed it, he gambled away much of what remained, before dying, broke, in 1736, the last of his line. The estate was, needless to say sold, including the Kirk Hallam elements of it.  

The purchaser was Francis Newdigate of Nottingham. He, for once, actually decided to live at Kirk Hallam, and elected to build himself a new house. We only have a pencil sketch of this house, although it survived well into the 20^th century, so it is difficult to say just what it was like. It appears to have been of brick with gabled cross wings with attic windows, the rest being of two storeys. The roofs were tiled and it was set on a modest park just west of the church. Clearly, Mr. Newdigate was a modest sort of fellow, although by the time of his death in 1764 he had amassed a considerable land-holding in Derbyshire and Warwickshire.

Yet, despite having built the house for his own use, it was let for a while when Newdigate entered his later years, to a relative, Francis Sacheverell Stead, son of another Nottingham grandee, Valentine Stead who, in the event, predeceased Newdigate by a year.

Newdigate’s heiress had married William Parker of Salford Priors, in Warwickshire (where the Newdigates also had property), so that their son, Francis inherited the Kirk Hallam estate at a fairly young age and assumed the surname and arms on Newdigate in lieu of Parker by Royal Licence in 1764. The family seem to have used the Hall at Kirk Hallam reasonably extensively, several members of the family being buried in the church there, rather than at Nottingham or in Warwickshire. Indeed, the Newdigates (latterly Newdigate-Newdegates and FitzRoy Newdegates of stunningly Gothick Arbury Hall in Warwickshire, where they employed George Eliot’s father) continued to held the estate until well into the 20^th century. It was only when death duties forced the sale of much of it that the suburban sprawl, which now defines the village, began to accrue around the church and Hall.

The house was extended in the 1820s with a two bay, two storey wing, marked by fenestration carried in projecting square bays, and which is the part of the house most visible in the picture.

From the later years of the 19^th century, the hall was again let, first to Joseph Prince, then to William Adlington. In 1888 the tenancy was taken by Shardlow-born Derby solicitor (and grandson of naturalist and traveller Sir Francis Sacheverell Darwin of Breadsall Priory) Francis Darwin Huish, who had just married Ellen, daughter of William Hickson. They were locally well known for having inherited from Darwin a vast majolica tobacco jar, wreathed in snakes, amphibians and other exotic creatures, made in Palissy Ware for Sir Francis by Portugese craftsman Manuel Cipriano Gomes (1829-1905). I understand that this remarkable object, on prominent display at Kirk Hallam Hall, is still in the hands of relatives to this day.

Huish died childless in 1917 but his widow continued there until her own death in 1925 aged 58, when the house was made available by the Newdigates to the incumbent as a vicarage, the previous vicars having had to live in Little Hallam, which was far from convenient. This was all very well, but the house was thought a little large for the needs of the parson of so modest a parish and so the freehold was acquired from the Newdigates – I believe by gift – and the house reduced just to the Regency portion and a cross wing in 1932.

Thus the matter rested until the Church of England, early in its period of taking control of parishes, suffocating bureaucracy and making money by selling glebe land for housing, decided that it was ‘too inconvenient’ for the then vicar and, in 1973 what remained was unceremoniously demolished and replaced by a rather workaday looking structure of no very great merit to the immediate SE of the church.

Nothing now remains of the old house, and the site is now occupied by a fairly modern brick building, Oliver House nursing home.