History of the Old Hall, Youlgreave

The position of the Old Hall with the open space in front of it and roads radiating from it in four directions suggests that it may have been the original manor house of Youlgreave.

The Peak District National Park Conservation Area Appraisal: Youlgreave (October 2010) notes: “The area in front of the Old Hall is very open, with buildings set back from the road edge, giving this area almost the feel of a village green, overlooked by the medieval manor house, with lanes leading off it to east, west and south.”

It is suggested by M W Barley in The English Farmhouse and Cottage (1961) that the Old Hall was rebuilt in the seventeenth century and that an earlier form of the building therefore existed.

It is believed that the Old Hall was owned by the Whittaker family for some 150 years, who lived there through the Civil War until 1792, after which it remained for many decades in the ownership of a single family (the Friths and the Hawleys). Ownership from the early years of the twentieth century to the present day, passed between some nine families, is documented.

As the local author and historian Roy Christian commented in an edition of Derbyshire Life in 1967 "At Youlgrave Old Hall, one is faced with more tradition and theory than actual fact". Popular (but so far unsubstantiated) stories about the Old Hall include:

• Oliver Cromwell stayed at the Old Hall and looked out through the "Oliver Cromwell" window upstairs in the west wing to check for the approach of Cavaliers from Alport.
• A fire burnt down the west wing.
• The actor James Robertson Justice (1907-75) fell through one of the floors when he visited the house in the mid-20th century.
• There are tunnels from the house going north to Old Hall Farm and south to the River Bradford.
• There is a phantom re-enactment of a duel between a Cavalier and a Roundhead in a room in the east wing known as the duel room each November (as mentioned in Paul Gater, Ghosts at War (2009) and various publications on ghost walks) . Owners going back to at least 1987 have testified that they have never met the ghost, but the story adds to the historic charm of the house.