Lost Tudor home found in Chorlton ..............

Now there are many myths, and half-truths about both Hough End Hall and Barlow Hall which circulate and pop up for debate from time to time.

The young Henry VIII, 1530-35

The most persistent are the tunnels which are supposed to connect the two, along with another which runs from the Horse and Jockey on the Green to the site of the old church.

So, the story goes they were dug during the Reformation and Counter Reformation as an escape route during religious persecution, while the pub tunnel allowed expensive and illegal casks of French brandy to be stored in the vaults of the church during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Of course, they are total tosh.  The residents of Barlow Hall were Catholics and those of Hough End Hall were Protestants and so hardly likely to conspire in challenging which ever form of Christianity was official during the 1540s into the 1590s, and neither the old St Clements nor its later replacement had a vault.

But it now turns out that there maybe more than a little truth in the story that Henry VIII had a hunting lodge somewhere close to the western side of Chorlton Park.

A chance find in the Royal Library of a book listing where the King visited during his Royal Progresses suggests that in 1539 on a trip to the North he commissioned the construction of a grand lodge close to an unnamed stream near what is thought to be Barlow Moor Road.

The building predates the second Hough End Hall which was built just over fifty years later and may have used some of the timbers and glass from the King’s house.

Sadly, nothing now remains of the lodge according to Eric Thistlewaite who was a superintendent at Manchester Parks and Recreational Grounds [retired]. He confirmed that prior to the laying out of Chorlton Park in the 1920s an extensive programme of digging in the location had found nothing.

Hough End Hall, 1849, all that is left of Henry's hunting lodge?

The most plausible explanation for the lack of any evidence is the simple one, that the lodge would have been made of prefabricated units which were assembled on site, and sometime in the mid-1590s Queen Elizabeth sold off everything including the fittings, furniture, and the fabric of the building to recoup losses made during the costly battle to defeat the Spanish Armada.

But the presence of the lodge has led  Mrs Trellis of Sandy Lane to call a meeting to petition King Charles to honour the township with the prefix Royal.  “I think” she said “it would be a great honour to live in the Royal Township of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, and who knows one day we may even be able to find out who the King entertained in his lodge, which I believe would have been just before his ill-fated fourth marriage”.

The exact location and time of tonight’s meeting has yet to be announced.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Henry VIII, circa, 1530-37, by Joos van Cleve,   Royal Collection RCIN 403368, and Hough End Hall in 1849, from The Family Memoirs, Sir Oswald Mosley, 1849