Summary
This early nineteenth-century, brick built, two-storeyed farmhouse, is the result of a rebuilding for the Earls of Ellesmere who had inherited the vast Bridgewater Estates. By the time that the house was built in its present form, the Egertons10 had given up the use of the property as a base when visiting or hunting on their Shropshire estates, with Ellesmere House in Ellesmere used on the rare occasions that they came to the county. Yet, in the late eighteenth century, the Dukes of Bridgewater had used Birch Hall as their seat on the visits to the estates. John Ingleby depicted the house as such in the 1790s and illustrated what appeared to be a rendered, two-storeyed timber-framed house of jettied construction, with two projecting gabled bays to the left, whilst the right-hand range of two bays terminated with a lower, one bay, gabled projection. Crowning the house was a chimney-stack composed of three diagonally set square shafts. The house was extraordinarily modest in comparison to the scale of the Bridgewater landholdings which dominated North Shropshire. The extent of these can be gleaned from the number of surviving public houses known as either ‘Bridgewater Arms’ or named from their armorial ‘The Red Lion’.
Birch Hall was offered for sale as lot forty, with 222 acres, when let to D.H.T. Edwards, at the time that the Bridgewater Estate was offered for sale by its then owners, the executors of the 4th Duke of Westminster, in 1972.
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- The Country Houses of Shropshire , pp. 107 - 108Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021