Country Images Magazine – Page 2 – Country Images Magazine

Lost Houses – Hasland House

August 30, 2015 Alistair Plant

Hasland is one of the many outliers of the Manor of Chesterfield, and was long held by the ancient family of Linacre, under whom it was, in the 15th century, tenanted by a cadet branch of the Leakes of Sutton Scarsdale. Thomas Leake of Hasland, for instance, was Bess of Hardwick’s maternal grandfather. After the […]

Lost Houses – Abbot’s Hill House

April 30, 2015 Alistair Plant

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It is very difficult to imagine, when looking at Derby’s Babington Lane with its endless tail-backs of ’buses, that less than a century ago it was virtually rus in urbe: the countryside in town par excellence. Indeed, the last owner of Abbot’s Hill House, that stood for just on two centuries between Babington and Green […]

Lost Houses – Sutton Scarsdale

April 1, 2015 Alistair Plant

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 […]

Lost Houses – Potlock House

February 26, 2015 Alistair Plant

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 […]

Lost Houses – Stainsby House

January 6, 2015 Alistair Plant

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 […]

Lost Houses – Wheston Hall

October 30, 2014 Alistair Plant

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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 […]

Lost Houses – The Field, Litchurch

August 28, 2014 Alistair Plant

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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 […]