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| The Gothick Arch |
By the time that I finished looking around St. Michael’s church, it had been more than 2 hours since I had alighted form the No. 496 bus in Foulby and I still had 17 buildings on my list to photograph for the British Listed Buildings website, which were spread out around Nostell Priory.
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| Listed buildings in the estate yard |
A cluster of these once formed part of the early Victorian estate yard for Nostell Priory laid out for Charles W Winn (1795-1874), but they have since been refurbished and converted into offices at the Nostell Estate Business Park.
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| The Monk's Refectory in 1999 |
The exception to this is the Grade II* Listed Monk’s Refectory, which Historic England states is a “farm building of uncertain former function, but perhaps refectory or lodgings to former Nostell Priory. Perhaps C15, altered in C17 or C18.” When I first visited Nostell Priory as part of a consultancy project at All Saints church in Pontefract, back in 1999, it was in quite a dilapidated state, but a lot of its masonry has since been restored with stone that I presume is from the Brackenhill Quarry.
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| The Monk's Refectory in 2022 |
Although the gated entrance to the business park was open, I was very aware that I really had no right to be wandering around this private estate. Being a Saturday and nobody around at the estate office to ask permission to take photographs, I just took a few general photos of various former farm buildings at a distance, along with the kennels and brick built estate office, before and continuing towards the stables.
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| Former farm buildings in the Nostell Estate Business Park |
The buildings that form the estate yard are all of much better quality than would usually be expected from stone built farm buildings and look like they would have been designed by an architect, but Historic England makes no mention of this.
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| The stables |
The Grade I Listed stables had already been photographed for the British Listed Buildings website and, after taking a couple of record photos that recorded the east and north ranges by James Pritchett and Charles Watson of York (1827- 1829), I headed north to the next building on my list.
The Grade II* bridge and boat house is described by Historic England as being built in the C18 but, according to the Gardens Trust Blog, was built in accordance with Stephen Switzer’s design of 1732 by John Winn, who inherited the estate in 1805 after the death of Rowland Winn, the 6th Baronet, in 1805.
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| Views of the bridge and boat house |
The Grade II* Listed Obelisk Lodge (1776) by Robert Adam is in the form of a narrow pyramid, which is pierced by a round-headed archway and framed by a massive Tuscan doorcase, with a screen wall on either side.
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| The Obelisk Lodge |
Although I hadn’t got near enough to the stables to look closely at the stonework, all the agricultural buildings that I had seen in the estate yard had the same pale muddy brown colour that I seen in the boundary walls and St. Michael’s church and I didn’t have any reason to think that anything but the local Ackworth Rock from Brackenhill/Ackworth Moor Top had been used.
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| A detail of the masonry in the screen wall |
I had noted various bedding structures and clay iron nodules that are quite usual in the Coal Measures strata, but the weathering of the soft sandstone blocks in the screen wall to the east of the arch reveals soft sediment deformation, which is typically found in fine silty sands.
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| Views in the courtyard of the stables |
Retracing my steps back to the stables, I had a very quick look around the courtyard, including the south and ranges by (1770-1176) by Robert Adam. I didn’t get down on my hands and knees to take a closer look, but I was interested to see that the riven sandstone paving had moulds and casts of burrows, which show that the flagstones have been laid down not only on their natural bed but also upside down.
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| Moulds and cast of burrows in flagstones |
After photographing the fountain and statue in the garden to the rear of the stables, I made my way down to the Middle Lake and went to find the later C18 Gothick Arch, where the soft grey/brown sandstone used for the rubble masonry is highly weathered.
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| The Gothick Arch |
Arriving at the Menagerie, a rendered handmade brick summer house, which is probably dated to the later C18 and perhaps by Robert Adam, according to Historic England, I was very surprised to discover that this has been built in an old quarry.
Returning to the path that runs alongside the Middle Lake, I stopped in a few places to get views of Nostell Bridge, of which I could only take photos from a very limited vantage point, when I had diverted from my walk from Foulby to Wragby much earlier in the day.
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| Nostell Bridge |
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