Country Images Magazine North January 2018

The Lost Houses of Derbyshire by Maxwell Craven Stuff ynwood Hall from the SE, from a postcard sent in 1907 STUFFYNWOOD HALL One of my oldest friends is a great enthusiast for huge spiky Gothic Victorian country houses. He thinks Samuel Sander Teulon (‘the good ship Teulon’ as he always calls him) a genius who far outshines Wren or Adam and considers Damien Hurst deserving almost of deiﬁ cation for buying and restoring vast, inchoate and sprawling Toddington Manor in Gloucestershire, designed by Charles Hanbury-Tracy, 1st Lord Sudeley, for himself and built between 1819 and 1840. Derbyshire is (in my view) blessedly free of houses like Toddington, or Somerleyton, or Mentmore. Most of our Jacobean is real Jacobean and Victorian prodigy houses have nearly all been demolished. Readers will recall an account of Snelston Hall last year – architecturally the best of them – of Osmaston Manor the year before, and you can still visit Eckington Hall (albeit seized by Sheﬃ eld City Council in 1936) in the NE of the County, which is a classic Hollywood ‘haunted house’ of a building. Locko Park although large, is largely Victorian, but harmoniously designed, spread around a fi ne early 18th century central block, tactfully incorporated. One particularly lumpish example of eclectic Victorian on a fairly epic scale was Stuff ynwood Hall which stood just south of Shirebrook and a short distance NW of Mansfi eld Woodhouse. Built in 1857-58, it is in French Chateau style - French chateau on speed – with a huge, chunky tower behind and a lower wing to one side, like the main house, steep-roofed and prickling with skinny chimney stacks and pop-up dormers. Th e entire composition was wonderfully asymmetrical, largely over two loft y ﬂ oors (plus attics), faced throughout in muscular rock-face ashlar of Permian Magnesian Limestone, and with a main block of three bays to the left and another three, wrapped round a vast canted bay with its own hipped roof, to the right. CountryImagesMagazine.co.uk | 21

Country Images Magazine North January 2018 | Page 21