Summary
An interesting early nineteenth-century house of circa 1815, with tall white stucco-rendered elevations beneath a shallow pitched roof with broad eaves, Neach Hill was built for the Bishton family and is probably by the same architect responsible for Church Aston Hall (see Longford Hall, q.v.) and Decker Hill (q.v.) as it now stands. Like both of these houses, the main south façade is defined by distinctive full height incised pilasters which flank the five-bay, two-and-a-half-storey elevation. The ground and first floor windows all have moulded surrounds, whilst the central door is fronted by a single storey portico with pairs of Greek Doric columns supporting a triglyph and metope frieze with flat entablature, and enclosing an apsidal wall with niches to each side of the door. Inside, the principal rooms have, at the time of writing, been largely destroyed by vandals, the doorcases and chimneypieces torn out. Plaster framing of the early nineteenth century remains on the walls, as do elaborate, decorated, coved friezes. At the centre of the house, the top-lit cantilevered stone staircase, with mahogany rail supported on open lyre-scrolled balusters, rises around a rectangular well with heavy dentil cornice and a glazed octagonal lantern. A single Greek Doric column has been inserted under a turn of the staircase at ground floor level to give further support. This, like the rest of the house, is in a lamentable condition due to water ingress caused by lead thefts.
Thomas Bishton was recorded as of Neach Hill and of Decker Hill in 1821, but in circa 1830 the house was apparently occupied by G. Lloyd when it was depicted in a pencil sketch by Elizabeth Reynolds with a long lean-to conservatory on a wall to the left of the entrance front. With Thomas Bishton’s death and bankruptcy in 1839, Neach Hill and Kilsall Hall were offered for sale and became the property of George Holyoake – a partner in the Wolverhampton bank, Goodricke and Holyoake, and scion of the Goodricke-Holyoake baronets of Studley in Warwickshire – who was living at the house by 1842. By 1881 the house was occupied by Walter Briscoe and a Miss Briscoe was living at the house in 1906. In the later twentieth century the house was occupied by Doveridge Antiques.
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- The Country Houses of Shropshire , pp. 460 - 461Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021