Smisby Manor House

Description

House, built in the 16th/ 17th century and altered in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is two and three storeyed, built of sandstone and brick with tiled roofs. The building was leased as a farmhouse from the early 18th to the late 20th century and has since been converted into a hotel and restaurant. The present building may incorporate the remains of an early 14th century house which is recorded on this site. A documentary source of the late 18th century refers to the upstanding remains of this early house and describes the building as 'strongly fortified'. (PastScape)

Smisby Manor House. The remnant of what was alleged to be a massive early 14th century house, a corner of which was rebuilt from the ground up in the later 16th century. The centre is tall, three storeys and attics, with two smallish gables. The east side is set back and plainer, and to the west a longer, lower range of four bays and two storeys, the upper windows having he eaves cambered over them, indicating a previous thatched phase. In the last years of the 18th century, Stebbing Shaw noted that some of the walls of the original edifice were still remaining and that it had once been 'strongly fortified', although no licence to crenellate survives. Henry Kendall paid tax on 12 hearths in 1662 and sold it in 1665 to the Harpurs who turned it into a tenanted farmhouse, which role it has fulfilled, with occasional exceptions, since. It was sold in 1978 with 158 acres. (Derbyshire HER ref. Craven and Stanley)

Comments

Emery writes 'Manor House which was administratively in Derbyshire but lost to Leicestershire in 1888'. Appears to still be in Derbyshire.