Ledston Hall

Country house, now partly subdivided as flats. The building shows five distinct periods of construction. It began around 1200 when monks of Pontefract Abbey built a chapel and kitchen, with an extension added around 1500. After the Dissolution, the Witham family acquired the property and incorporated these medieval elements into a modest courtyard house around 1560. This was later transformed by grandiose seventeenth-century additions: first Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, added the south wing around 1630, and subsequently Sir John Lewis completed the structure around 1660 by extending north of the main range and adding the north wing. In the early eighteenth century, Lady Betty Hastings made stylistic alterations to the principal facades and probably to the interior. Further interior alterations were made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The house is planned in a U-shape around a forecourt facing east, with the earlier elements projecting to the rear. It is mostly two storeys over a basement with gabled roofs presented as attics and corner turrets. A string course runs around the whole building marking the division between basement and piano nobile, with the turrets having similar string courses on two levels above.

The principal range, eleven bays symmetrical, is approached by a straight flight of steps protected by a wrought-iron balustrade with Lady Betty Hastings' initials worked into it, leading to the principal entrance in the centre of the piano nobile. The doorway has glazed and panelled double doors and a moulded architrave with carved consoles supporting an entablature and open segmental pediment, from the centre of which an eagle displays a medallion with a monogram on the pedestal beneath. In a vaulted passage below the steps is a doorway to the basement with a moulded architrave. The basement has recessed cross-windows; the piano nobile has twenty-four-pane sashes with plain surrounds; the second floor has square twelve-pane windows with similar surrounds, those to the right mostly horizontal sliding sashes and the others fixed (some blocked behind the glazing). The roof line is disguised by five Dutch gables containing vertical oval windows glazed in quadrants with architraves, the gables finished with small pediments alternately triangular and segmental.

The wing courtyard returns, both of four bays, have similar features except that each has a pedimented doorway to the centre of the basement and the south wing has a second door with architrave and keystone. The four corner turrets of the wings each have tall narrow sashed windows with double-recessed reveals, a blind top stage with prominent modillioned cornice, and a low ogee-shaped pyramidal lead cap with a ball finial. Between the turrets each wing has two windows on each floor and one Dutch gable, all matching the others. In the angles of the wings are lead rainwater heads lettered "EH" (Elizabeth Hastings), and against the south wing is a small block of mounting steps.

The return wall of the south wing, of seven bays, has a first-floor string course, horizontal sliding sashes at basement level, twelve-pane sashes at first floor with heads that break through the string course and have cornices matching it, four square horizontal sliding sashes at second floor with similar cornices, and straight gables above these (the first and fourth of slightly different pitch). The rear of this wing has two gables, remains of a cross-window at first floor and an altered window or doorway beside this, and three inserted windows above.

The return wall of the north wing, of eight bays, has cross-windows on the first two floors, each with a string or drip course above, two-light mullioned windows at second floor (irregularly disposed) with cornices, and four Dutch gables. At ground floor towards the east end is a wide archway with flat four-centred head, imposts and keystone, the string course stepped over it, opening into a recess approximately one and a half metres deep and now partly blocked (purpose unknown).

The rear or west front of this wing, of five bays, has a corner turret like those at the front and fenestration matching its return wall, with three windows at second floor with Dutch gables above them.

Projecting to the rear is the sixteenth-century building incorporating the medieval fabric. It is rectangular in plan, formed by three ranges enclosing a small inner courtyard, and two storeys high, with string courses on two levels and two square corner turrets. The south range, containing the medieval chapel at first floor (altered as parlour) with ground floor undercroft, has in its south wall two deeply-chamfered square-headed lancets and a three-light mullioned window at ground floor and four irregularly disposed cross-windows above. In its gable end (the right-hand part of the west front) are two similar lancets at ground floor and one cross-window above. Further left this front has a Tudor-arched doorway approached by steps, with a bell in a square opening over it, two circular windows and three cross-windows, and at first floor three other cross-windows. There is a parapet to the west range, linking the gables of the north and south ranges. The corner turrets, of three stages, have narrow windows in the outer walls; those at first floor divided by transoms. The north range has two cross-windows on each floor, those at first floor coupled, a narrow window on each floor close to the junction with the main building, and a large chimney on the ridge.

The development history is obscured by successive interior alterations, but the principal range of the seventeenth-century building appears to incorporate the front range of the sixteenth-century house in altered form. The room to the left of the main door is its hall, with a massive external chimney stack to its rear courtyard wall and remains of a stone arched fireplace visible in a cupboard in this wall. The medieval chapel, converted to a parlour by the Witham family (known as Lady Betty Hastings' parlour), has a wooden fireplace surround and overmantel in Renaissance style, and a moulded plaster ceiling with pendants, both dated 1588, and seventeenth-century panelling. The dining room in the south-west corner of the south wing has restored eighteenth-century panelling and fireplace, and in its rear wall a black marble buffet framed by pilasters and an entablature with cornice. The northern part of the main range is double-pile, with a central corridor running through it with massive stone architraves to the doors on both sides. There is an elaborately decorated cross-corner fireplace in the closet at the south end of the hall, and two others in closets at the east end of the south wing (now flat).