Walled Garden And Orangery

Walled Garden and Orangery at Croft-on-Tees, Halnaby

A walled garden and former orangery built in the mid-18th century for Ralph Milbanke of Halnaby Hall. The structure is constructed in red brick laid in English garden wall bond with brown sandstone ashlar dressings and wrought-iron gates.

The walled enclosure is quadrangular in plan and approximately 3 metres high, with its wall subsequently raised by about 500 millimetres and topped with ashlar coping. The south side features a central gateway where the walls sweep sharply downward. This gateway is flanked by ashlar gate piers with chamfered rusticated quoin strips, plain Tuscan pilasters with horizontal tooling to north and south, chamfered bases, and cornice capitals above plain friezes. The easternmost capital was dismantled at the time of the survey. The gates themselves—stored elsewhere during the survey—have square bars topped with corkscrew finials and inverted-V-shaped finials to intermediate bars above central scrolled decorative panels. One gate includes a small wicket section. The upper cross-piece bears Ralph Milbanke's ligatured initials, readable from both sides, arranged three-dimensionally with branches, leaves, and fruit. The west wall contains a board door in a segmental-arched opening positioned about one-quarter of the way from the south-west corner.

The north side contains the orangery, comprising a semicircular recess in the garden wall with side walls projecting forward and a roofed projection to the rear. In front stands an ashlar terrace with moulded edge, protected by a 20th-century screen wall of glazed brickwork panels (incomplete at the time of survey). At either end stand rusticated ashlar piers terminating the side walls, which rise rearward to taller matching piers with pedimented capitals. The centre features a 20th-century perspex protective half-dome set against a boarded gable.

The orangery's rear elevation shows two side-sliding sash windows with flat arches on ground and first floors, the ground-floor window frames incomplete. The rear wall rises to form a swept gable, formerly with an apex chimney and coped gables. It is pitched-roofed in Westmorland slates.

Internally, the orangery floor is paved and continuous with the terrace. The half-dome above the recess displays decorative plasterwork featuring a cornice with bead-and-reel and rope motifs, half-quatrefoils with ribbon, acanthus leaf and shell motifs, and a concave quatrefoil at the centre. The wall containing the recess was heated, with a cavity and stoke-holes accessed from the rear part of the orangery; one stoke-hole was later blocked, the other adapted for a 19th-century boiler. The first floor of the rear section, accessible by ladder, contains racks for storing fruit behind slatted partitions to exclude vermin. Fragmentary surviving sacking, stored on rollers, was moved into position to protect fruit trees from frost.

To the right of the orangery are three altered windows serving a bothy behind the wall, of no special interest. To the left, a segmental-arched doorway features an 18th-century wrought-iron gate of square bars with inverted-V-shaped finials to intermediate bars above a scrolled central panel. Added above this, though now detached, are the initials of John Todd, who purchased the Halnaby estate in 1843. Lead rainwater pipes and heads on the orangery, cast with a date in the 1750s, have since been stolen.