Thornton Hall

Thornton Hall is a manor house, now a farmhouse, with a complex construction history. The front range dates from around 1550, built for Ralph Tailbois, and a rear range was added around 1630 for Sir Francis Bowes. The house has undergone alterations and additions in the 18th century and around 1880. It is built of coursed rubble with ridged concrete tiles and Welsh slates, and features stone chimneys.

The original design comprised a hall and a projecting cross wing, though a left cross wing has been removed. A two-storey extruded porch is located to the right of the hall. A rear range extends from the right, with a narrower extension to the left. A small, one-storey addition dating from around 1880 sits to the left of the hall block.

The front range is two storeys high with attics, featuring gabled hall and cross wing sections, each two bays wide, with a porch at the junction. The porch has a bolection-moulded doorway, a sash window, and a parapet decorated with blank shields and gargoyles. A blocked round-headed light is present on the left return of the porch. First-floor sash windows are set within moulded 18th-century surrounds, with the end bays blocked. There are three-light, partly-blocked mullioned windows with arched heads under hoodmoulds in the attics. The left side has an embattled parapet, and between the gables. The roof is steeply pitched with coped gables. A corniced stack is located at the left end, and a taller stack is on the valley to the right. The right return displays a three-storey façade formed of two builds with a straight joint. The wider front section features a bolection-moulded doorway with a pulvinated frieze and scrolled pediment, alongside sashes and blocked cross windows in architraves, mostly under scrolled pediments, and a steeply-pitched roof hidden behind the parapet.

The later rear section, two bays wide, features three-light mullioned-and-transomed windows, many of which are part-blocked or sashed. Floating cornices overhang, with the centres forming triangular pediments on the ground floor and semicircular pediments on the first floor. A four-pane light sits within an eared architrave below the eaves beneath a low-pitched roof. The irregular left return reveals a gabled extension behind the end of the hall range, with chamfered window surrounds. The main rear range has blocked or sashed two- and three-light mullioned windows, some with transoms. The twin-gabled, three-storey rear section has blocked or sashed two-light mullioned windows and cross windows, topped by a low-pitched two-span roof.

The c.1880 one-storey addition on the left of the hall block features sashes and a steeply-pitched roof.

The interior of the ground-floor hall (now a kitchen and passage) retains around 1550 chamfered oak beams with Flamboyant carving and cyphers relating to Ralph Tailbois. An early 18th-century panelled room is located to the right. A mid-17th century open-well staircase has a closed string, bold turned balusters, and a moulded handrail, with possible late 17th-century columnar newel posts linking the flights. A subdivided first-floor bedroom contains a damaged late 16th-century plaster ceiling with intersecting ribs, fleurs-de-lys, shells, and the Tailbois coat of arms. The front attic retains original plaster flooring, a studded partition wall, and a Tudor-arched wood door lintel bearing the initials of Ralph Tailbois. The later 19th-century single-storey wing on the left of the front range is not of notable architectural interest.