Building record 15769/1 - Davenport Hall, Brereton

<1> Cheshire Gardens Trust, 2011 onwards, Research and Recording Report (Report). SCH6655.

Medieval to Jacobean times: Manor of one of Cheshire’s leading families.
The core of the old hall appears to remain extant; parts may date back to the C15.
The building is not listed by English Heritage or noted by historians of architecture.
1676 - c.1923: For 250 years Davenport Hall was not inhabited by its owners but was maintained and leased out as ‘the residence of a gentleman’s family’1. Thus, the site escaped the radical alterations and landscape improvements undertaken during the C18 and C19 by the owners of neighbouring estates.
There appears to have been no major change to the layout of the associated landscape and small gardens until the 1990s, when the hall was extended, its gardens re-designed and a cascade of 7 ponds created E of the hall.

The Davenport family’s origin goes back to one Orme at the time of the Domesday Book. He was given the manor of Davenport by the Venables of Kinderton and assumed the local name.
In the 1180s the Earl of Chester granted the master forestership of the forests of Leek and Macclesfield to Richard de Davenport. The office was hereditary.

The house was described in John Leland’s Itineraries5 of 1535-43: “The best and firste house of the Davenportes is at Davenport, a great old house coverid with leade on the river Daven (Dane).”

<2> Burdett, P. P., 1777, A Survey of the County Palatine of Chester (Maps and Plans). SCH113.

Davenport Hall is marked at this location at the centre of a parkland enclosure (possible deerpark)

<3> Greenwood, C. & Greenwood J., 1819, Map of the County Palatine of Chester (Maps and Plans). SCH2115.

Marked as Davenport Park, house shown within a area of parkland which extends southwards to the A54 road. A lodge is shown at the crossroads

<4> See map for surveyor, c.1837-51, Cheshire Tithe Maps and Awards, EDT 136/2 Davenport c.1839 (Maps and Plans). SCH3266.

Plot name recorded as "Davenport Hall outbuildings gardens and pleasure grounds"

<5> Ordnance Survey, 1871-1882, Ordnance Survey County Series (Epoch 1) 25 inch to 1 mile - Cheshire, SJ7966 1873 (Maps and Plans). SCH2462.

Davenport Hall marked and building shown within formal garden setting.

<6> Ormerod, G., 1882, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, vol.iii, p. 67 (Book). SCH1389.

The hall is a low building of various materials…, and doubtless retaining in its walls many relics
of the antient mansion which occupied its site… It stands on high ground above a range of rich meadows, through which the Dane flows rapidly.”

<7> Twycross E, 1850, The Mansions of the County Palatine of Chester (Book). SCH3208.

The hall is “a long, low, irregular building principally of two storeys high, probably of a very early origin and of various dates of architecture…. The house is situated on a wooded eminence of high table land. The rich valley below is intersected by the river Dane, which flows in a winding course through wooded and often precipitous banks; and the surrounding scenery comprises views which, for picturesque beauty, are little, if at all, inferior to any in the county – the range of the Derbyshire and the Macclesfield hills forming a fine background to the landscape.”

<8> National Remote Sensing Centre Ltd, 1992-3, National Remote Sensing Centre County Survey (1992-1993) (Aerial Photograph). SCH5297.

The N wing of the hall appears to have been demolished – as have the N and E garden boundaries.

<9> Bluesky International Ltd, 2015-2017, Aerial Photography for Great Britain, Bluesky International APGB Imagery 2015-2017 (Aerial Photograph). SCH8848.

Hall: The old hall seems to remain as the E wing, with modern extensions added on its N, W and S.