Whirley Hall

Hall: Constructed around 1670, with 20th-century alterations and additions. The hall is built of Flemish bond orange brick with buff sandstone dressings. It has a Kerridge stone-slate roof, a stone ridge, and two brick chimneys. The symmetrical front façade features three or four stories and five bays arranged in a 2:1:2 pattern. Brick bands run across the first, second, and third floors. The lower two stories have 20th-century wooden windows with mullions and transoms, featuring glazing bars, set within flat wedged brick surrounds. The third story has two-light casements. Above each pair of end bays is a stone-coped, shaped, gabled dormer, topped with an obelisk finial, and containing an elliptical window set within a rectangular stone frame. The central bay contains a glazed door with a flat, gauged, and rubbed brick surround. A similar surround is present above the mullioned window and the third-story circular window, which is set within a square stone frame. The end gables are stone-coped with stone kneelers on a single-story, two-bay 20th-century extension that is architecturally sympathetic, to the left and right. The original ground plan is retained within the interior, exhibiting chamfered ceiling beams and a prominent oak dogleg staircase with turned, slightly bulbous, balusters, a heavy handrail, and square newels with some reeding. The hall was built as an addition to an earlier timber-framed hall, which has since been demolished. A stone bearing the date “1599” was discovered during renovations, however, the architectural features generally suggest a late 17th-century construction date, with the exception of the gables.