On the banks of the Calder, in Lancashire, Gawthorpe Hall raises a tall, compact silhouette of grey stone, vertical and symmetrical: an Elizabethan house of the very start of the seventeenth century, built by the Shuttleworth family around an older defensive tower. From a distance it reads almost as a single upright block, a design that belongs wholly to the new taste for height and order.
A new house around an old tower
The foundation stone was laid on 26 August 1600; the house was completed around 1605. The plans had been drawn up by Richard Shuttleworth, but it was his brother, the Reverend Lawrence Shuttleworth, rector of the parish, who carried the work through after Richard's death. The striking feature: the new house wraps around a pele tower — a fourteenth-century watchtower, built by the Shuttleworths at a time when Lancashire feared Scottish incursions. Look at the tall, regular façade, the mullioned windows, the belvedere turret at the top, crowned with carved mottoes: the compact, vertical plan, kin to Hardwick Hall, has traditionally led the house to be attributed to Robert Smythson (the attribution remains debated). Inside survive fine plaster ceilings and inlaid panelling of the early seventeenth century, as well as a long gallery running the width of the upper floor. Precious to historians, the Shuttleworths' building accounts have been preserved: they document, item by item, the raising of a great house around 1600 — a rare record of the English Renaissance building site, labour and materials included, from the felling of timber to the wages of the masons.
From warlike frontier to house of prestige
Gawthorpe illustrates the pacification of the North under the Tudors: where towers were once built to survive raids, a house of light and display is now raised, keeping the old tower as its core. At the top of the belvedere turret and in the entrance porch, carved mottoes recall the Puritan piety of the Shuttleworths, a family of law and the Church. In the mid-nineteenth century, the celebrated architect Sir Charles Barry (of the Palace of Westminster) remodelled the house for Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, creating among other things the terrace garden; the ceilings bear the "KS" monogram. The novelist Charlotte Brontë, a friend of the family, stayed at Gawthorpe in the very early 1850s, a guest of the Kay-Shuttleworths. In the twentieth century, Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth assembled there an important collection of textiles and lace, begun in 1912 and today one of the most remarkable of its kind in England. The house passed in 1970 to the National Trust, with a long lease to Lancashire County Council. Look for: the Smythsonian façade and its belvedere turret, the enclosed pele tower, the plaster ceilings, the inlaid panelling, and the textile collection.
Did you know?
At the heart of Gawthorpe hides a tower of war: a fourteenth-century pele tower, built when Lancashire feared raids out of Scotland. Around 1600, the Shuttleworths did not demolish it — they built their Renaissance house all around it, enclosing it in a casket of windows and symmetry. The house of peace quite literally swallowed the tower of war.
Markers
Gawthorpe Hall lies at Padiham, near Burnley (Lancashire), on the banks of the Calder. Its Renaissance interest rests on the house of 1600-1605 built around its medieval pele tower and attributed by tradition to Robert Smythson. The house later passed to the Kay-Shuttleworths and is now in the care of the National Trust.
Quiz
- What lies at the heart of Gawthorpe Hall?
- A medieval watchtower (pele tower) enclosed by the house
- A Roman chapel
- A sacred well
- To which architect is the house traditionally attributed?
- Robert Smythson
- John Nash
- Inigo Jones
- When was the foundation stone laid?
- On 26 August 1600
- In 1066
- In 1850