Casterton Old Manor

Description

House. Early C19 with earlier rear wing. Coursed stone rubble with ashlar dressings and slate roof. 2 storeys, 3 x 2 bays. Quoin strips and hipped roof with wide eaves. Windows have splayed ashlar reveals, label moulds and small-paned casements of 2 pointed lights with moulded frames. South facade has pointed entrance and panelled door to central bay, with later half-glazed lean-to porch. Returns have lateral stacks. North wing of 2 bays has to west elevation paired sashed windows to ground floor, the sashes with glazing bars and horns; 1st floor windows have splayed ashlar reveals and label moulds and are sashed with glazing bars. Entrance with panelled door and overlight; cross-axial stack. East elevation has single storey wing; casement windows. (Listed Building Report)

Old Manor, house, about m. S.S.E. of the church, is of two storeys; the walls are of rubble and the roofs are slate-covered. It is largely modern, but incorporates a N.W. block with thick walls of the 17th century or earlier. (RCHME 1936)

A former post-medieval farmhouse, now two houses. The main element of the house was built in the early 19th centurty but the rear wing is older. Built of coursed stone rubble with a hipped slate roof, the building is L-shaped, with two storeys (except to the east elevation which is a one storey wing). It has dressed stone quoins and lintels to the windows. The building may be on the site of an older hall house, presumably a medieval manor house. (PastScape)

At the end of the fourteenth century Robert de Bellingham held the manor from Robert de Vere, a favourite of Richard II given the new title of duke of Ireland by the king in 1386. Bellinghams continued to head the list of tenants until the mid sixteenth century, when a Bellingham daughter, Katherine, married Richard Assheton of Middleton in Lancashire. It descended by the marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of Katherine Assheton, to the Davenport family of Bromhall in Cheshire who sold it in 1638 back into the Bellingham family of Levens. Elizabeth, daughter and coheir of Sir Henry Bellingham of Levens, married about 1650 John Lowther of Lowther, and so it came into that family, and the manor house in Casterton, no longer needed, was abandoned. This house in High Casterton, now called the Old Manor, is almost entirely of the nineteenth century, although there are some seventeenth century walls in the north-west block, as well as the remains of a large arched hearth. It was noted by Machell in 1692 as 'an old ruinous building now only fit to contain a farmer' and was still listed as a farm well into the twentieth century, reverting, by the beginning of the twenty-first, to private use as two houses. (Garnett 2014)

Comments

Site of gentry status medieval manor house. Included by Perriam and Robinson in their gazetteer of medieval fortified buildings but there is no evidence the medieval house was fortified. There is no mention of a moat or a tower.