Upstairs To Downstairs

The gradual decline of an old Catholic family helped preserve this magnificent manor house, finds John Martin Robinson

- Martin Robinson

WITH its mellow stone, gables, many chimneys and superb setting on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, Lawkland looks like the romantic ideal of a manor house (Fig 1). From the 1570s until the end of the 19th century, the house belonged to a junior branch of the Ingilbys of Ripley Castle (Country Life, September 30, 1993). Their gentle social decline from gentry to yeomen after the late 18th century explains its picturesque survival.

Credit for Lawkland’s present appearance, however, must also go to more recent owners. J. N. Ambler, a Bradford wool manufacturer, bought the estate in 1912 and used the proceeds from sales of khaki in the First World War to undertake ‘extensive but sensitive modernisation’.

After the Second World War, it was bought by the Bowring family and the setting has been much enhanced recently by the beautiful garden created by the present owner’s wife, Felicity (Country Life, November 4, 2005).

The early history of Lawkland is recorded in Whitaker’s Richmondshire (1823) and repeated by all subsequent writers. There is no reason to doubt it. The first hall was reputed to have been built by the Yorkes, a long-established local family in the Middle Ages. Then, in about 1572, the manor and house were purchased by John Ingilby, second son of the Ingilbys of Ripley, for £500, as part of wider purchases in Yorkshire and Durham that established him as a substantial landowner in his own right.

He probably reconstructed the house and Whitaker described it as ‘a spacious and respectable hall house, of which part may seem to be as old as the purchase of the estate by the Inglebies’. Certain 16th-century features survive, including a spiral staircase and doorways with four-centred stone arches.