Now I have been fascinated by Barlow Hall for a long time
but I have to confess I have never been there so when Andy Robertson sent me
some pictures of the place I decided it was time to rerun an old story.
Andy visited the hall earlier in the month and that prompted
me to repost a story of Mrs William’s tour of the property back in 1887.
“In rambling through Barlow Hall only a short time ago, we
found a succession of tiny silent bedrooms, each opening into its neighbour,
and each into a long narrow, rickety corridor.
From the corridor we could see, through square bits of
coloured glass, traces of a quaint timbered court yard and learnt that this was
the oldest part of the house, and these bedrooms were probably used by the
daughters of Alexander Barlow.”
For me this remains a pretty exciting if short tour of our
oldest building. Mrs Williamson had
wandered through the hall sometime in 1887 by which time it had been the
residences of William Cunliffe Brooks for over thirty years.
The hall had been the home of the Barlow family since the
Middle Ages and there may have been a building on the site dating from that
period, but the present half-timbered structure dates probably from the reign
of Henry VIII. Little of the original structure was visible by 1848 when the
Brooks family moved in.
Most of the timber work had been covered in plaster or
hidden under ivy. The old great hall, which occupied most of the building and
was open to the roof, had been divided to create two storeys, with the lower
floor given over to three entertaining rooms.
This interest never appeared to have left him, and led Mrs
C. Williamson to write in her Recollections of Fallowfield that his ‘love for
old things is so great that every relic is sacred to him, and even mindful
alterations are made in such close imitation of old, they look the real thing’.
It was a passion that led him to display a piece of the
original timber which had been exposed after a fire in 1879, and our own
Chorlton historian may well have been speaking from first-hand experience when
he advised that ‘Mrs Brooks’s morning room is worthy of a visit, with its
quaint old china, and the vestibule containing some fine old Furniture and an
engraving of Wellington with his autograph’
Pictures; the coutyard in 1910 and the sitting room window
which looks out onto the courtyard 1890-95 by S.H. Jones, from the Lloyd
collection, and the Hall in August 2014 courtesy of Andy Robertson
No comments:
Post a Comment