Tissington Hall

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Tissington Hall

Tissington Hall is an early 17th century Jacobean mansion house situated at Tissington, near Ashbourne. Derbyshire. It is a Grade II* listed building.

The old moated manor at Tissington was replaced with the new mansion in 1609 by Francis Fitzherbert and remains the home of the Fitzherbert family. Both Francis Fitzherbert and his son (Sir) John served as High Sheriff of Derbyshire, a post that circulated among the county families.^[1]

Tissington Hall: the stable block is on the left

It is the hall that makes Tissington Hall unusual. It is one of a small group^[2] of compact Derbyshire gentry houses in which a central hall runs through the house from front to back.^[3] Nicholas Cooper surmises that the unusual, progressive character may be due to the influence of lodges (he counted some fifty emparked estates in Saxton's map of the shire, of 1570) and the grand example of a through-hall at Hardwick. Behind a two-storey enclosed entrance porch (illustration, right), the hall is entered at the center of one end. On the left are two parlors separated by a stairhall, on the right a kitchen and buttery. Corner towers on the garden front, now linked by the additional upper floor above the gallery range, provide further rooms.

A rococo gothick fireplace in the house follows a published design by Batty Langley.^[4]

The Hall is open to the public at specified times of the year and is available for commercial and private functions.

[edit] Notes

^ Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry 1480-1680 (Yale University Press) 1999:196-98.
^ Cooper 1999:198 notes the similar plans at Park Hall, Barlborough, and at Weston Hall, Weston-on-Trent.
^ This aspect of Tissington's plan is obscured by the transverse gallery with a central oriel that was added to the garden front in the eighteenth century.
^ Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840, 3rd ed. (Yale University Press) 1995, s.v. "Batty Langley".