Turnours Hall

Turnours Hall is a house dating back to around the 17th century, built on a medieval site, and substantially remodelled and extended in the 1860s or 1870s, with a date of 1871 recorded. The house is constructed of red brick in a Flemish bond pattern, with decorative brick dressings. It has a gabled roof covered in plain tiles, and brick stacks with multiple octagonal and diagonally-set moulded shafts.

The building’s layout includes an entrance hall with a stairwell behind it, a cross-wing to the left, extending to a late 19th-century chapel at the rear, separated by a small courtyard enclosed on the north side by a later 19th-century service wing. The architectural style is Tudor Gothic.

The house has two storeys, an attic, and a cellar. The east front is asymmetrical, with four bays. Bays one and three are gabled, with two-storey square bay windows. These bay windows have five-light windows and overhanging gables supported by moulded terracotta brackets. Moulded brick string courses and quatrefoil panels are above the first-floor windows in the bay windows. Casement windows have four-centred arch lights and leaded panes; those in bays two and four are two-light, and those in the gables have polygonal heads with brick hoodmoulds. Similar casements are in half-hipped dormers. A four-centred arch doorway is in bay two, with panelled double doors. The south elevation shows a similar treatment to the right-hand gabled bays, but the left-hand section appears to be a later 19th-century extension with a gabled oriel over a wide bay. The north elevation has a gabled bay to the left, similar to those on the east front, and a later 19th-century wing projecting to the right, featuring a five-bay arcade on the ground floor and three-light windows above, with a brick oriel in the centre. At the rear (west) are two gables on the left and the chapel on the right, featuring three Gothic Y-tracery windows with cusped lights.

The interior features Victorian Gothic joinery, including fireplaces and a large staircase with stained glass windows. A plaster relief in the hall is believed to be by Ada Palmer. A hall chimneypiece replaced one illustrated in the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. The Dining Room has 18th-century fielded panelling and a chimneypiece. The Chapel includes a 1903 memorial with fielded panelling and stained glass by Ada Palmer.

Turnours Hall was the home from around 1860 to 1914 of Ada Palmer, the sculptor and painter, whose studio, "The Studio," was a converted barn to the south.