Millwood

Large house, built around 1860, probably by Edward Browning of Stamford. The house was altered and extended around 1876 by the architects Paley and Austin. It was built for Edward Wadham, an agent to the Duke of Buccleuch. The building is constructed in coursed sandstone on a slate basement with ashlar limestone sills and red sandstone dressings; the later work is entirely in red sandstone. The roofs are covered in graduated slate.

The main house is 2 storeys with a half-basement and measures approximately 4 by 4 bays in High Victorian Gothic style, with a 3 by 2 bay addition set lower on the south side.

The entrance front features an ashlar plinth with moulded band and quoins. A diagonal buttress rises on the left. The doorway itself is a 6-panelled door under an arched stone transom with ball-flowers, with a plain overlight. Above the door is a shield bearing the BQ monogram in a crowned Belt of the Garter, and a small sash window above that. The doorway's hoodmould becomes a continuous string course, forming annulets around downpipes and rising to the right past a tall 3-light stair window with transom, shouldered lights and heraldic glass under a relieving arch. Below and to the right of the stair window are boarded windows with quoined surrounds. To the left of the door is a broad lateral stack with offsets and twin square flues under a shared cap with ball-flowers. Above the stair window rises a gable with moulded copings and a fleur-de-lys finial; smaller gables to either side have kneelers with gablets. The end gables are steeply pitched, with the right gable containing a twin flue stack matching the one beside the door.

The rear elevation shows battered half-basement walling, with the gabled left part projecting and containing a bay-window on 3 limestone brackets beneath a later wooden bay-window. To the right is a shallow bay-window with an ashlar roof and a gabled half-dormer with an animal-head gargoyle to its left. A 5-flue stack rises from the valley. The left return contains 2 gables, the left one with an external stack pierced by a pointed window and a blank shield above. A buttressed gable projecting on the right has a canted bay-window of 1:4:1 lights with shouldered heads; an ashlar bay-window above dates from 1876.

The 1876 addition is much plainer, with plain sashes set in chamfered, mullioned windows of 2 and 3 lights. The south side features a 1-storey porch and gable with bellcote flanked by roof dormers.

The interior displays prominent Gothic Revival styling. The stairhall has a patterned and encaustic tile floor and a staircase with a balustrade of colonnettes with cusped arches between them; octagonal newels have finials. The stained glass stair window displays the Buccleuch monogram and motto alongside spiritually uplifting texts on diagonal banners, with a panelled ceiling above. The front-left room has a pierced oak-leaf cornice. The rear-left room features a marble fireplace beneath a window and a pierced ivy-trail cornice. The rear room has a panelled ceiling.

Edward Wadham, mineral agent to the Duke from around 1856 and Mayor of Barrow from 1878 to 1881, lived in the house. The Buccleuch archives contain papers relating to the alteration and rebuilding of the villa at Millwood around 1860, the year of Edward Wadham's marriage. An undated illustration shows Millwood with an older house on the site of the 1876 addition. Plans for the 1876 work survive in building records.

The house later became a home for the elderly around 1947 and was disused at the time of survey.