Buckshaw Hall

Buckshaw Hall is a manor house, likely dating from the early 17th century or earlier, with a restoration carried out in the 1880s. It is currently unoccupied. The building is constructed of square-panelled timber framing set upon a plinth of large sandstone blocks, with both wattle-and-daub and later brick infilling. It has a slate roof with a chimney on the ridge, an external chimney on the right-hand side wall, and another rising from the eaves behind this, all featuring brick flues with tumbled bricks between the flues, rising from stone stacks.

The layout is an H-plan, incorporating a baffle-entry and two-bay crosswings projecting from a hall range, with a projecting staircase turret behind the hall. The building is two storeys high. The left wing includes a two-storey porch with its own gabled rooflet, featuring a boarded door with a slightly arched wooden lintel pegged into flanking posts. Both wings feature jettied first floors and gables, with plaster coves and ovolo-moulded bressummers carried on scrolled brackets. The front elevation displays angle-braced upper panels throughout the first floor and at ground floor of the left wing, while curled braces form lozenge-shaped upper panels at ground floor of the right wing. Both gables have raking struts and collars; they also have wavy bargeboards and finials, likely dating from 1885. The left gable incorporates an ex situ datestone lettered ‘ER’, and the right gable has a datestone lettered ‘1654’. Large, modern casements have been inserted at ground floor in the centre and right wing, with replacement sliding sash windows (three lights except the centre, which has four) on each floor. A first-floor, three-light window with diamond-section wooden mullions is located close to the front corner of the left return wall of the left wing. The rear elevation features a gabled staircase turret in the centre.

The interior has been altered, but retains a baffle-entry with back-to-back fireplaces at the junction of the hall part and north wing. The fireplace in the wing (kitchen) contains a large inglenook with stop-chamfered bressummer and a Victorian iron cooking range. Other original features include stone flagged floors, a spiral newel post staircase in the north wing, and a 17th-century stone fireplace with ovolo-moulded jambs and head in the parlour of the right wing, incorporating an external chimney, along with stop-moulded beams. Original internal partition walls are timber framed with wattle-and-daub infilling and feature original doorcases with four-centred lintels—many joints are numbered. Muntin and rail panelling is currently stored loose in the parlour. Although now in poor condition, with some propping and a large hole in the rear wall, Buckshaw Hall is considered the finest building of its type in Lancashire.