Cheswardine Hall, Entrance Forecourt Walls And Gate Piers

This is a country house built in 1875 to replace an earlier building for C Donaldson Hudson. The architect is unknown. It is constructed of red brick with ashlar quoins and dressings, and has tiled roofs. The architectural style is Elizabethan Revival, with an asymmetrical plan based on a rectangular form with a cross-wing to the right and two service ranges to the left. The house is two storeys and has attics, with strings marking each floor. The irregular gabled frontage and varied roofline create a balanced composition, despite the principal rooms being centrally and to the right, as the left side is balanced by subordinate rooms, including a four-storey tower porch with a balustraded parapet. The windows are mullion and transom style, with two and three lights, cornices to the attic windows, moulded range copings, and finials. Linked octagonal chimneys are arranged picturesquely on the right-hand side and more regularly on the left.

To the right are three windows under a gable, a minor bay below a dormer (now featuring a metal fire escape from the first floor), and a projecting gabled wing. To the left is a lower section flush with the porch, with two gabled half-dormers, a minor gable (to the back stairs), and a lower three-bay projecting gabled wing linked by a curved gable. The entrance portico is Classical in style, with paired Doric columns and a strapwork parapet, incorporating a rounded five-light stone bar window above. The return to the right (south) is equally gabled and varied.

The interior features a panelled entrance hall leading to a top-lit stair hall, accessed by steps and a skew doorway that suggests an earlier core, possibly a courtyard. The decoration includes late 16th/early 17th century panelling and ceilings, alongside stronger Queen Anne elements, notably the rooms and a principal baroque library with fluted pilasters and a plaster wreath on the ceiling featuring high relief fruit and flowers. The drawing room has a particularly fine ceiling. On the first floor, one bedroom has Adam-Revival ceiling decoration and a chimney piece. Chimney pieces throughout the house are of good quality, mostly in 18th century English and French styles. A spectacular feature is a quoin-vaulted cross-axis distribution corridor terminating in an angled bay-window seat.

The entrance forecourt is defined by low brick walls and two sets of rusticated brick piers with stone dressings and bell finials; to the left are taller reverse quadrant walls with further gate piers leading to a back drive. The grounds include impression gardens, particularly a walled garden to the northwest with clipped yews, and a Japanese garden to the south.