Eccleston Hill Lodge is a gateway and lodge near the village of
Eccleston,
Cheshire, England. It stands at the entrance of the Chester Approach to the
estate of
Eaton Hall.
The structure is recorded in the
National Heritage List for England
The National Heritage List for England (NHLE) is England's official database of protected heritage assets. It includes details of all English listed buildings, scheduled monuments, register of historic parks and gardens, protected shipwrecks, a ...
as a designated Grade II*
listed building
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...
.
History and critique
The building was designed by
John Douglas for the
1st Duke of Westminster in 1881. The authors of the ''
Buildings of England
The Pevsner Architectural Guides are a series of guide books to the architecture of Great Britain and Ireland. Begun in the 1940s by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the 46 volumes of the original Buildings of England series were publish ...
'' series describe it as "marvellous".
Douglas' biographer,
Edward Hubbard
Edward Horton Hubbard (2 July 1937 – 31 May 1989) was an English architectural historian who worked with Nikolaus Pevsner in compiling volumes of the ''Buildings of England''. He also wrote the definitive biography of John Douglas, and played ...
, refers to its "ducal grandeur".
The description in the ''National Heritage List for England'' concludes by describing it as "a bravura gatehouse, impressive for its grand scale, picturesque massing and rich detailing".
[
]
Architecture
The 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 mo ...
has three storeys and "a hipped roof
A hip roof, hip-roof or hipped roof, is a type of roof where all sides slope downwards to the walls, usually with a fairly gentle slope (although a tented roof by definition is a hipped roof with steeply pitched slopes rising to a peak). Thus, ...
so high and so steep as to be virtually a spire".[ The lowest storey is in banded stone, the upper two storeys are in red brick with ]diapering
Diaper is any of a wide range of decorative patterns used in a variety of works of art, such as stained glass, heraldic shields, architecture, and silverwork. Its chief use is in the enlivening of plain surfaces.
Etymology
For the full etymolo ...
in blue brick and stone dressings, and the roofs have red tiles. An arched gateway forms the bottom storey and contains an ornate wrought iron
Wrought iron is an iron alloy with a very low carbon content (less than 0.08%) in contrast to that of cast iron (2.1% to 4%). It is a semi-fused mass of iron with fibrous slag inclusions (up to 2% by weight), which give it a wood-like "grain" ...
gate. Under the archway is ribbed vaulting
In architecture, a vault (French ''voûte'', from Italian ''volta'') is a self-supporting arched form, usually of stone or brick, serving to cover a space with a ceiling or roof. As in building an arch, a temporary support is needed while rin ...
. Centrally over the gateway is a stone panel containing armorial
A roll of arms (or armorial) is a collection of coats of arms, usually consisting of rows of painted pictures of shields, each shield accompanied by the name of the person bearing the arms.
The oldest extant armorials date to the mid-13th centu ...
carvings. Above this are transomed and mullion
A mullion is a vertical element that forms a division between units of a window or screen, or is used decoratively. It is also often used as a division between double doors. When dividing adjacent window units its primary purpose is a rigid supp ...
ed windows and at the top is a spirelet (small spire). One each side of the panel are smaller windows. From each corner of the gateway arises a tourelle (a turret
Turret may refer to:
* Turret (architecture), a small tower that projects above the wall of a building
* Gun turret, a mechanism of a projectile-firing weapon
* Objective turret, an indexable holder of multiple lenses in an optical microscope
* Mi ...
on a projecting corbel). In addition on the right is a circular stair turret with a conical roof. To the right of the gatehouse is a two-storey wing, the lower storey in banded stone and upper storey timber-framed
Timber framing (german: Holzfachwerk) and "post-and-beam" construction are traditional methods of building with heavy timbers, creating structures using squared-off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large woode ...
. To the left is a small single-storey wing, also in banded stone.[
Internally there is an oak spiral staircase and oak doors. The large room above the gateway contains a fireplace in Tudor style.][
]
See also
*
* Listed buildings in Eccleston, Cheshire
*List of houses and associated buildings by John Douglas
John Douglas (1830–1911) was an English architect based in Chester, Cheshire. His designs included new churches, alterations to and restoration of existing churches, church furnishings, new houses and alterations to existing houses, and a v ...
References
{{Reflist, 30em
External links
Photograph dated 1887
Gates in England
John Douglas buildings
Houses completed in 1881
Gothic Revival architecture in Cheshire
Grade II* listed buildings in Cheshire
Gatehouses (architecture)
Grosvenor family
1881 establishments in England
Cheshire West and Chester