Aston Eyre Hall is an unfortified stone

manor house A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were held the lord's manorial courts, communal meals w ...

Aston Eyre Aston Eyre is a hamlet and civil parish in Shropshire, England, about four miles west of Bridgnorth. The area has a significant amount of green space. The spine road that runs through the centre of the village is the B4368. History Aston Eyr ...

near Bridgnorth in the

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county A county is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposesChambers Dictionary, L. Brookes (ed.), 2005, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh in certain modern nations. The term is derived from the Old French ...

Shropshire Shropshire (; alternatively Salop; abbreviated in print only as Shrops; demonym Salopian ) is a landlocked historic county in the West Midlands region of England. It is bordered by Wales to the west and the English counties of Cheshire to th ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. It is a Grade II* listed building.

History

Aston Eyre Hall was built in the mid-14th century, probably for Alan de Charlton, who acquired the estate by marriage to Margery FitzAer and died in 1349. It consists of a hall range, with a service wing to the south-west and a parlour cross-wing to the north, and a detached

gatehouse A gatehouse is a type of fortified gateway, an entry control point building, enclosing or accompanying a gateway for a town, religious house, castle, manor house, or other fortification building of importance. Gatehouses are typically the mos ...

to the east, across what would have been an unusually large entrance court. The gatehouse has been incorporated into a farmhouse, but tree-ring

dendrochronology Dendrochronology (or tree-ring dating) is the scientific method of dating tree rings (also called growth rings) to the exact year they were formed. As well as dating them, this can give data for dendroclimatology, the study of climate and atmos ...

dating of the surviving timber floors have suggested a felling date of 1341–52. A large timber-framed barn enclosing the courtyard on the north has been similarly dated to 1613. The hall dais was originally lit from a large window bay, which has been demolished although traces remain. There must have been a central hearth in the hall. Both the parlour wing and the south range had heated upper chambers. The narrow extension of the south range has several slit windows for storerooms, and excavations have revealed the footings of an equally narrow west range, no doubt also used for storage.

Popular culture

The manor was the subject of a

season 5 A season is a division of the year based on changes in weather, ecology, and the number of daylight hours in a given region. On Earth, seasons are the result of the axial parallelism of Earth's tilted orbit around the Sun. In temperate and po ...

episode of the

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned enterprise, state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a four ...

series

Time Team ''Time Team'' is a British television programme that originally aired on Channel 4 from 16 January 1994 to 7 September 2014. It returned online in 2022 for two episodes released on YouTube. Created by television producer Tim ...

. Filmed between 27 and 29 June 1997, the team attempted to uncover and decode the history and development of the site.

References

J. Newman & Sir N. Pevsner, ''The buildings of England: Shropshire'', 2nd edn., 2006, pp. 122–123 M. Wood, ''The English medieval house'', 1965, pp. 77–8, 104, 110, 132, 133 (plan), 334 {{coord, 52.5430, -2.5123, display=title, region:GB_scale:2000 Country houses in Shropshire Grade II* listed buildings in Shropshire