Author name: Richard Clarke

This fifth of six blogs was initiated following a visit to Gainsborough. Gainsborough Old Hall is a late medieval manor house ranged around a central courtyard which is, however, open to the south. It thus has three connecting ranges of building compartments, north, east and west wings. It is in the guardianship of English Heritage, is […]

Derby cathedral was a parish church until 1927 when it was elevated to cathedral status. The criteria by which this elevation is achieved is by the installation of a bishop’s chair, it does not require any enlargement or other physical changes, although the option might be chosen. So, like at All Saints, Gainsborough, at some

Stallingborough church (see picture shwing tower as viewed from the south with trees obscuring the nave) stands detached from the modern village but beside a deserted medieval village site evidenced in the ‘humps and bumps’ in permanent pasture. This site, in its day, would have been dominated by the manor house of the influential Ayscough family.

Just ‘across the road’ from Gainsborough Old Hall stands All Saints Church surrounded by its now grassy and tree planted churchyard. It is a fine example of a combination of Gothic and neo-Classical architecture, the latter a product of the Renaissance. The surviving late-Perpendicular west tower (Gothic) was retained when the remainder of the medieval

Recently visited Gainsborough having not been for many years. Found it very interesting. First of all visited ‘Marshall’s Yard’, a shopping complex created by adapting previously factory buildings around a works yard to retail units. Very well done, ample public seating and parking and one unit, the Laura Ashley unit, being un-ceiled allows customers to

In anticipation of receiving an invitation to the wedding thought best to read-up on the above from a booklet have had for years (must have been bought on a visit to the town, not the castle, back in the early 1980s). The man-made mound of the original motte-and-bailey castle survives with the keep having some