Above: The Grimshawe family’s hilltop cemetery lies just behind the ruins of Errwood Hall. The raised central memorial is carved with the names of the family members. Their coffins are interred in a sealed vault below.

View more Journal entries on the Grimshawe family, their relatives, friends and staff.

The Grimshawes of Errwood Hall

For almost a century, one family shaped life in the Goyt Valley. This is their story, condensed from Gerald Hancock’s ‘Goyt Valley Romance’ with the kind permission of Christine Hancock. Read the full book (PDF).

Notes: I’ve added I, II, III and IV after the various Samuel Grimshawes to help identify them. Samuel Grimshawe I. Samuel Grimshawe II (1768-1851). Samuel Grimshawe III (1811-1883). Samuel Grimshawe IV (1850-1851).

A Manchester merchant

Samuel Grimshawe (II) was born in 1768 into a wealthy Manchester merchant family. A former pupil of Manchester Grammar School, he became Borough Reeve of Manchester and a director of the Manchester Assurance Company.

He also sat on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Committee. After many years in Mosley Street, he moved to Mill Bank, a mill property on the Mersey at Partington.

In the 1830s he bought more than 2,000 acres of the Taxal valley from John William Jodrell – including the Cat & Fiddle inn.

Above: The Earl of Derby (1799-1869) served three terms as UK Prime Minister.

The Earl of Derby promptly challenged the purchase, claiming the inn stood on his side of the boundary. Grimshawe brought the old men of Taxal before a Master in Chancery.

One of them, Daniel Downes, swore that a previous owner had walked the boundary with him as a boy: “It may be of use to thee some time.” His evidence won the day, and the Cat & Fiddle stayed with the Grimshawes.

Building Errwood Hall

Work on the Hall began in the mid-1840s, overseen by Samuel’s son, Samuel (III), who lived with his mother and sister at the old Errwood Farm while it was being built.

Errwood Hall was Italianate in style with Norman details – a turreted, double-winged house of millstone grit with a central tower, a terraced garden and a view east towards Long Hill. Above the front door was the family crest, a dragon.

Samuel III had been educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he came under the influence of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement. In 1849 he married Jessie Allan in Edinburgh.

Their son, Samuel Arthur Hope (IV), was born in May 1850. That June, Samuel III’s mother died, and his father followed in January 1851, aged 83. Then in August 1851, the infant Samuel died at the Hall, aged just fifteen months.

A Catholic household

In 1851 Samuel III converted to Catholicism, taking the name Samuel Dominic. The upper floor of the Hall’s northern wing became a private chapel, dedicated to St Mary and consecrated that October before a crowd of some 500 people.

Above: A unique photo taken inside Errwood Hall showing the Grimshawe family’s Catholic chapel.

Two daughters followed: Mary, born at Errwood in December 1851, and Genevieve, born in Paris a year later.

By 1861 Samuel was a county magistrate with a cosmopolitan household – a German governess, a French butler, Irish maids and a Lancashire cook. The Hall was full of books, from Dickens first editions to tales of African exploration.

Above: An early 1900s postcard view of St Anne’s Catholic Church.

He was a generous benefactor of the Catholic Church. In 1860 the seven-year-old Genevieve laid the foundation stone of St Anne’s Church in Buxton, which her father had helped to fund.

Yachts and celebrations

In 1870 Samuel bought the ocean-going yacht Mariquita, and the family spent long spells sailing the Mediterranean.

At home they loved to entertain. When the sisters came of age in 1873, the tenants were treated to donkey races, sack races and a pig chase – the pig going to whoever could catch it – followed by a feast in a marquee and dancing into the evening.

Samuel Dominic Grimshawe died at the Hall in April 1883 and was buried in the family’s hilltop graveyard.

Jessie inherited the estate. When she died in London in 1893, she was brought home to lie beside him.

Two marriages

In 1891 Genevieve married Captain Edward Preston, son of the 13th Viscount Gormanston, at the Brompton Oratory.

Above: Esme Preston was a cousin by marriage of the Grimshawe sisters and lived at Errwood Hall for many years.

The couple had no children, but Genevieve’s young cousin by marriage, Esme Preston, came to live at Errwood in the late 1890s and was brought up there as the favourite of the house.

Captain Preston died suddenly in France in 1901 and was carried to the hilltop graveyard by family and tenants.

In 1902 Mary, then 51, married Hellier Gosselin of Bengeo Hall, Hertford – a quiet, courteous man with a passion for archaeology, who took the name Gosselin-Grimshawe.

He travelled between Errwood and his duties on Hertfordshire County Council by train, and was well liked in the valley for visiting anyone on the estate who fell ill.

The last years

Errwood remained a happy place: sledging parties in winter, summer visits from the Preston children, trips to the Cat & Fiddle for lemonade, and rides in Esme’s new motor car.

The sisters themselves preferred their coach and pair. There was no wireless or telephone at the Hall, and they were remembered dressed in black lace, bringing bags of sweets for the children at the estate school.

Tramps passing through were always fed, and food parcels from an “anonymous” donor reached the poor children of Whaley Bridge.

Above: A rare photo of both Mary and Genevieve posing shyly in the doorway of Fernilee Village Hall at the opening ceremony in 1926.

Hellier died in 1924, and Genevieve in January 1929. That November, Mary asked for midnight mass to be held in the chapel once more – it had been a long time, she said, since it was full at Christmas.

She died on 23rd February 1930, the last of the family, and was the last to be buried in the hilltop graveyard.

The end of Errwood

That same year Stockport Corporation bought the estate to build Fernilee Reservoir. The contents of the Hall were auctioned in June 1930.

The Hall was demolished in 1934, along with about 20 farms and cottages and the hamlet of Goyt’s Bridge. It’s often said the Hall became a youth hostel in its final years, but the Goyt Valley hostel was actually at Errwood Farm.

Today the ruins of Errwood Hall, surrounded by the rhododendrons the family planted, draw thousands of visitors each year.

See also the Goyt Valley timeline.