Bolesworth Castle: A Grade II* Listed Country House in Cheshire
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Modern
- Civilizations
- British
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Castle
On this page8 sections
History
Bolesworth Castle is a country house in the United Kingdom, near Tattenhall in Cheshire. William Cole designed the present castellated house for Manchester businessman George Walmesley in 1829, replacing an earlier house built in 1750. The building is now listed at Grade II*, a high level of heritage protection in England reserved for particularly important buildings of more than special interest.
The nineteenth-century house
Robert Barbour, a Scottish businessman who founded a cotton-textile business in Manchester, purchased the Bolesworth estate in 1856. The property has remained with the Barbour family since that time, linking the house’s later history to the family’s long-term ownership of the surrounding estate.
Remodelling and estate stewardship
Between 1920 and 1923, the Welsh architect and designer Clough Williams-Ellis partly remodelled the house. He later became widely known for creating the Italianate village of Portmeirion in Wales.
Anthony Barbour inherited the house and its 24-square-kilometre estate in 1989. He developed the estate as a centre for small businesses, restored redundant buildings, modernised its 16 farms, and supported approximately 800 jobs. He also replanted the grounds with more than 350 varieties of trees. In 1998, the Royal Agricultural Society of England awarded him the Bledisloe Gold Medal for his work on the estate.
Anthony Barbour died in 2007. Since then, his widow Diana and their daughter Nina, the estate’s director, have cared for Bolesworth.
Remains
The surviving estate is organised around a sandstone country house and a series of landscaped terraces, drives, and associated structures. Its principal architectural character comes from the house’s castellated design, which uses forms associated with fortified buildings while serving as a country residence.
The house and terraces
Castellated country house
Bolesworth Castle is built from ashlar sandstone, finely dressed masonry laid in regular courses. It is mainly two storeys high, with wide canted bays, which project outward with angled sides, at the centre and on the right. A wide rounded bay stands on the left. The recessed central tower rises to three storeys and is accompanied by turrets, or small projecting towers.
Terraced grounds
The grounds descend through an upper terrace with a wall and steps, a middle terrace with its own wall and steps, and a lower terrace with a wall. On the south side of Chowley Drive stands a temple containing a statue of Diana, the Roman goddess associated principally with the hunt and the natural world.
Drives and water features
The estate’s associated structures include park gates, gate piers, and wing walls on the north drive, together with gate piers on the drive from Chowley Lodge. An open shelter, a bridge over the fishpond, and a boathouse at the southern end of the fishpond form additional elements of the surviving grounds.
