A look at the history of Netherside Hall, Threshfield, with Dr Emma Wells

Netherside Hall rises from a wooded promontory above the River Wharfe, a mile northwest of Threshfield, tucked just east of the B6160 in the heart of Wharfedale. Within the Yorkshire Dales National Park, its 11.7 hectares of grounds—formerly 42 acres—still hold the echoes of a small estate: lawns and woodland, a walled garden, and the scattered remnants of working life in the outhouses, the old coach house, and the lodge.

The Hall itself originated in the early 1820s, when Alexander Nowell—fresh from making his fortune in India—leased land from the Atkinsons of Linton House and built a hunting lodge of neo-Jacobean and Gothic ambition. George Webster of Kendal, the master mason-architect known for shaping the region’s houses and churches, is believed to have drawn its design. Netherside, like Underley Hall which he also built for Nowell, carried Webster’s signature blend of revivalist romance and local craftsmanship.

When Nowell died at Netherside in 1842, the property passed to his niece Margaret Atkinson, who soon adopted the Nowell name and arms by Royal Licence. Over the next few decades, the Hall moved through the hands of her descendants: Alexander Dawson Nowell, then his brother Ralph Asheton Nowell, whose children left their names and heights pencilled onto the back of a ground-floor door, before eventually being sold by Roger Whitaker Nowell.

A new chapter began in 1912, when wool magnate Clement Holdsworth bought Netherside as his country retreat, as a place for fishing, shooting, and respite. After the First World War, a wooden hut appeared in the kitchen garden, offering Boys’ Brigade camps and holidays for children who had little else.

The Holdsworths sold the estate in 1924 to R. Geoffrey Ellis. Then, by 1938, it was transformed again, this time into a girls’ preparatory boarding school, later a special-needs school under county ownership, with its doors finally closing in 2012.

Netherside Hall was sold by North Yorkshire County Council and purchased in 2015 by a charity. It is now leased to Yorkshire Camps, who run residential activity camps for children and young people.

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Books by Dr Emma Wells