Toft Hall is a 17th-century country house in Toft,

Cheshire Cheshire ( ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in North West England. It is bordered by Merseyside to the north-west, Greater Manchester to the north-east, Derbyshire to the east, Staffordshire to the south-east, and Shrop ...

, England to which additions and alterations have been made during the following three centuries. It is constructed in brick, which has been rendered, with stone dressings and a

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

roof. It is in two storeys, and has four-storey towers. The house 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, ...

as a designated Grade II*

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...

. Its stable block is listed separately at Grade II. Features of the estate include an arched stone bridge, a

ha-ha A ha-ha ( or ), also known as a sunk fence, blind fence, ditch and fence, deer wall, or foss, is a recessed landscape design element that creates a vertical barrier (particularly on one side) while preserving an uninterrupted view of the lan ...

, a

woodland garden A woodland garden is a garden or section of a garden that includes large trees and is laid out so as to appear as more or less natural woodland, though it is often actually an artificial creation. Typically it includes plantings of flowering shrub ...

and parkland.

History

The Toft estate came into the Leycester family when Ralph Leycester of Tabley married heiress Joan Toft of Toft in the late 14th century during the reign of

Richard II Richard II (6 January 1367 – ), also known as Richard of Bordeaux, was King of England from 1377 until he was deposed in 1399. He was the son of Edward, Prince of Wales (later known as the Black Prince), and Joan, Countess of Kent. R ...

. The hall itself was built in the later part of the 17th century "to an extremely old-fashioned layout". Ralph Leycester (1763–1835), MP for Shaftesbury (1821–1830), commissioned the London architect

Samuel Pepys Cockerell Samuel Pepys Cockerell (15 February 1753 – 12 July 1827) was an English architect. He was a son of John Cockerell, of Bishop's Hull, Somerset, and the elder brother of Sir Charles Cockerell, 1st Baronet, for whom he designed the house he is ...

to renovate the hall between 1810 and 1813. These improvements included the addition of a library, dining-room and twin towers. Ralph was succeeded by his only son, Ralph Gerard Leycester (1817–1851) who was succeeded in turn by his son, Rafe Oswald Leycester (1844–1929). Rafe died childless and left the estate to his nephew, Cyril Leycester Maude Roxby (1877–1942) and in 1949 it was inherited by Cyril's nephew, Edmund Roxby (b. 1913). During the Second World War Toft Hall was the site of a prisoner of war camp. In 2010–12 the Hall was extensively renovated and extended with a rear orangery, to the designs of Mason Gillibrand Architects of Lancaster.

History

See also

References

Further reading