Country Images Magazine Derby Edition June 2017 | Page 23

D e r b y s h i re -
Lost Houses
T HE LOST HOUSE S OF DER BYSHIRE
by Maxwell Craven
SHALLCROSS HALL
The Dark Peak was never a place welcoming enough, through
elevation or climate, to encourage the erection of major country
houses, although small stone built manor houses were built,
especially in the environs of Chapel-en-le-Frith. Shallcross hall,
therefore, was something of an exception, being a classical
house of moderate size situated on as windy hilltop just south
of Whaley Bridge but on the Derbyshire side of the Goyt.
Th ere was once a medieval village below the
ridge which may have faded away through de-
population during the Black Death, a generation
prior to which the county’s ancient charters
record the fi rst known lord of the manorial estate,
detached from the King’s Forest of the High
Peak, Swain de Shalcross (the family usually spelt
their name with one ‘l’). His fi rst name would
suggest that he was probably of Norse descent
rather than Norman or Anglo-Saxon.
No one knows what shape the fi rst house took,
although at that date - around 1300 – it was
probably timber framed under thatch. Th at there
was a stone built Elizabethan or early Jacobean
replacement is without doubt, for it was assessed
for tax on six hearths which suggests that it was
of the same sort of modest dimensions as most of
the surviving small manor houses of that sort of
date in the area.
Houses usually get replaced when incomes go
up, and John Shalcross, fi ft eenth in descent from
Swain, seems to have expanded his estate and had
the good fortune to have discovered deposits of
coal thereon, too. Indeed, there was a colliery
of relatively early date not far to the East of the
house, later served by a rope worked tramway
which connected to the Peak Forest Canal.
Th erefore John set about building a new seat
on a site a few yards from what we presume to
have been that of its predecessor. When Mick
Stanley and I wrote it up for our two volume
epic Th e Derbyshire Country House in 1982
(followed by revisions of 1991 and 2001), the
only earlier account of the house was printed in
the Derbyshire Archaeological Society’s Journal
for 1905, from which my exterior views (by
Derby amateur photographer A. Victor Haslam)
were taken. Th is was written by Ernest Gunson
with help from the Journal’s editor, W J Andrew,
and they made much of the resemblance of the
millstone grit-built house to Ditchley Park in
Oxfordshire, designed by James Gibbs.
I said in 1982 that although Gibbs came to Derby
to oversee the start of work on the Cathedral in
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