Dumbleton Hall

Dumbleton Hall is a country house built in Tudor style around 1830 by the architect George Stanley Repton for Edward Holland. A service wing was added in two phases during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The building is constructed of ashlar limestone from the Temple Guiting quarries with a slate roof and ashlar stacks.

The main body is rectangular, three storeys high, with a projecting early 20th-century porte cochere at the front and a curving orangery at the south-west corner. The service wing lies to the north of the main body. The entrance front features twin projecting gables with corner buttresses with offsets. The left-hand gable has a late 19th or early 20th-century five-light canted bay with stone mullions and a strapwork band at the top on the ground floor. The right-hand gable displays an early 20th-century rectangular bay window lit by two and three-light stone-mullioned casements with transoms at ground floor level, with paired or single stone-mullioned cross windows to the first and second floors.

The central porte cochere was built in 1905 and features a large segmental-headed stone-mullioned window with transom at the front and wide segmental-headed openings to the return walls. A double studded plank doorway sits within. The porte cochere has a strapwork parapet and strapwork frieze below the parapet, which continues around the bay windows and the left-hand return. Two gablets mark the left-hand return, which has fenestration similar to the entrance front but includes a two-storey bay window formerly with a parapet and a segmental-headed doorway probably inserted in 1905 within a former window opening. An octagonal stair turret with an ogee-curved cupola stands at the south-west corner.

The orangery, probably dating to the late 19th or early 20th century but matching the style of the main body, curves away to the left with three wide glazed segmental-headed windows with glazing bars. A gable to the cross room features diagonal buttresses at the left end. The rear elevation follows the same style as the entrance front but includes a battlemented stone-mullioned oriel window and three octagonal stair turrets—two with ogee-curved cupolas (one stone, one leaded) and one flat-roofed.

The service wing follows the same style as the main body but uses ovolo-moulded stone-mullioned casements. All windows throughout the building have glazing bars. Octagonal axial stacks with moulded cappings crown the composition. A deep parapet with moulded capping and string course runs along the main body and service wing. Finials at the apex of each gable and gablet are now lost. A stone parapet with moulded capping linked to the service wing runs across the entrance front and returns parallel to the south-east front, with part of the parapet retaining strapwork balustrading.

The interior appears to have been extensively remodelled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Eyres and Eyres-Mansell families. The panelled hall features a ribbed ceiling in 17th-century style incorporating panels decorated with the busts of a Roman soldier inscribed 'IOSV E DUX' and small pendants. A Tudor-arched stone fireplace has an ornate wooden overmantel with mannerist decoration featuring ferns and finials. A 19th-century staircase with square balusters rises from the hall.

The panelled ballroom, formed from two former rooms, has linenfold decoration to the lower panelling and a deep frieze decorated with trees and draped figures. The ceiling features decorated rhomboses containing naturalistic representations of plants including roses, thistles and oak branches, executed in shallow relief plasterwork of particularly fine quality, probably to a design by Arts and Crafts group craftsmen. Similar decoration adorns the ceiling of the former dining room.

The panelled billiards room has a plastered ceiling with intersecting plastered beams decorated with scrollwork and a heavy oak leaf frieze adjoining the library. The dining room, formerly the study, displays a Corinthian and modillion cornice with two large fluted Corinthian columns marking the junction of the earlier house with the service wing. A rectangular stairs lantern features heavy decorative plasterwork. The first-floor plan has been altered by the insertion of corridors.

The novelist Mrs Gaskell, a cousin of Edward Holland, was a frequent visitor to the hall. Holland's eldest son married Mrs Gaskell's daughter. The poet John Betjeman stayed at the hall and wrote three poems there.