ADLINGTON HALL

Grid Ref. SJ 905 805
18 June 2001

Adlington, Cheshire spacer Elizabethan Wing
The Georgian South Front completed in 1757   The Elizabethan East Wing
Inxcription

Detail of the inscription found over the door to the courtyard showing date of 1581
.


Courtyard

North East corner of the courtyard

In 2001, after a gap of some years, Adlington Hall was open to the public on Monday and Wednesday afternoons in June and July. There is a coloured brochure describing the main features of the house and the Legh family.

The hall is on the site of a hunting lodge which predates the Norman Conquest. Two huge oak tree, still rooted in the ground, remain from the lodge and can be seen in the Great Hall. At the Conquest the lodge came in to the possession of Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester. In the early 13th century the hall was granted to the de Coruna family who held it for four generations before running out of male heirs. Eleanor the daughter of Sir William de Baggilegh was the heiress (see the additions and corrections in Ormerod's History of Cheshire). She married John de Legh of Booths and their son, Robert de Legh eventually succeeded to the hall and estate. The hall has remained in the same family ever since, albeit with succession through the female line in the 18th century, in 1888 when it went through two females, in 1940, and again in 1992. The family tree below showing the succession of heirs from the late 17th century is drawn in part from the hall's brochure and in part from East Cheshire Past and Present by J.P. Earwaker, London, 1877.   Stuart Raymond, in Cheshire: A Genealogical Bibliography, Vol. 2 lists as a source Cheshire families: Legh of Adlington in Advertiser Notes and Queries, 1, 1882, 186-9.

The hall is now in two distinct parts.  The north and east sides are from the 15th and 16th centuries and are half timbered.  The south and west sides are in brick and were built in the middle of the 18th century.  The porch shown in the photograph above has above it the inscription with the name Thomas Legh and the date 1581. Through this porch is a hall dating from 1505, built by an earlier Thomas Legh. It has a hammer beam roof and at the end for the high table a canopy, described by Nikolaus Pevsner as the finest in the county. It has 5 tiers of panels with letters at the intersections making up an inscription with the date 1505.

Arthur Mee relates the story that Sir Urian Legh, one of the family's ancestors in the 16th century was knighted for his services at Cadiz in 1596.  According to a ballad of the time he captured a Spanish lady.  He treated her with great courtesy and she gave him a golden chain, which he wore when his portrait was painted.

Sources

The Buildings of England: Cheshire, by Nikolaus Pevsner and Edward Hubbard, first edition 1971, Yale University Press edition in 2003.
The King's England, Cheshire, edited by Arthur Mee, published by Hodder and Stoughton, 1938, fourth impression 1950.

Back to list of  families
Introduction to Cheshire Gentry

index button

Cheshire Antiquities
© Craig Thornber, Cheshire, England, UK.  Main Site Address: https://www.thornber.net/

W3C XHTML 1.0Strict W3C CSS