Standing in front of Hough End Hall in the mid 1960s

Now this is one of those pictures of Hough End Hall which continues to fascinate me.

It surfaced a week ago in a collection of photographs taken by Roger Shelley who has kindly agreed to them appearing on the blog and in a book about the Hall.*

The date is uncertain but there are clues to when Roger took it on that wintry day.

The number plate of the van should yield the year the van was registered which will perhaps bring us within a decade of a date while  the state of the building suggests that it was sometime during its renovation by the developers who bought the hall in the mid 1960s and went on to build Crown House.

This was the office block to the south of the hall which has yet to be constructed although the old farm buildings which it replaced have been demolished.

So we are getting close and with a bit more research may get almost the exact year that Roger stood in front of the Hall.

And that is not all, because the Hall as it stands will help reveal some of the changes which have been made since the 1960s under successive periods of restoration.

All of which is important for our understanding of its history but alongside these are two very personal observations.

The first is that this is one of those pictures which brings me closer to what I might have seen had I turned the gate into the garden just before the developers took over.

Of course the barns to my left have gone as has the garden but here is a clear image of the hall before its addition of ivy in the 19th century.

I doubt very much if the Mosley’s who built it would have suffered it to be covered by the stuff.

And secondly only weeks before Roger’s picture appeared I came across a slightly earlier photograph of three children sitting on that same stretch of wall staring out at the Hall and flanked by farm buildings to their south and with geese clucking towards them.

As ever there is nothing more magical than being able to put yourself in the same spot as someone from the past.

Picture; Hough End Hall, sometime in the mid 1960s, from the collection of Roger Shelley, https://www.flickr.com/photos/photoroger/

*Hough End Hall The Story by Andrew Simpson & Peter Topping to be published later in the year in support of Hough End Hall: Let's make it ours! http://houghendhall.org/