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These two timeless houses have been passed from family to family

- Penny Churchil

AN article in the August 27, 1904, number of COUNTRY LIFE intones grandly: ‘Houses of the class of Stibbington Hall have a particular claim upon the regard of Englishmen. They are to be found in every shire, but are most numerous in some districts in which the inhabitants enjoyed the fuller measure of that prosperity which came with Tudor and Stuart times, when the roads were improved and the waterways made more available.’

The writer goes on to lament the lost status of so many of ‘these houses of strong and solid character, mostly fallen to decay, often reduced to the character of farmhouses; and not seldom does the peasant sit by the fireside about which gathered the family of the Cavalier’.

Only once in its long history did such a fate befall the Grade I-listed Jacobean Stibbington Hall, built in 1625, which sits in 19 acres of formal gardens, lawns and paddocks on a loop of the River Nene, eight miles west of Peterborough, in what was historically the north-west corner of Huntingdonshire, but is now Cambridgeshire. The calamity took place after 1757, when the then owner died and the house was leased to a farmer.

There followed a period of decline that was swiftly rectified when, in the early 1800s, Edward Steed Girdlestone bought the hall and carried out a sympathetic programme of repairs and improvements, before moving there in 1836. Following his death in 1843, his widow—the third ‘merry widow’ to play a part in the evolution of Stibbington Hall—gave the property to her daughter on her marriage to John Maylin Vipan, a respected local Justice of the Peace.