A look at the history of Womersley Park with Dr Emma Wells

At the southern tip of North Yorkshire, near Doncaster, Womersley Park occupies a shallow bowl of pasture sited around the small village of Womersley. At its heart stands Womersley Hall, a Grade II* Listed country house, set in a diminished but still legible frame of gardens, woodland and former parkland. Its story begins in 1680, when the London barrister Tobiah Harvey bought the manor and installed a new house as the visible claim of his ascent. During the next century, three generations of Harveys shaped both house and landscape. In the 1760s, Tobiah’s grandson, Stanhope Harvey, added a southern wing, pushed the old main street aside to secure privacy, and began the conversion of a working village into a classic mid-Georgian act of estate-making through geometry, planting and control of movement.

In 1797, Frances Harvey married the 3rd Baron Hawke, grandson of Admiral Sir Edward Hawke of Quiberon Bay fame. The Barons Hawke spent heavily. They enclosed Womersley Common, planted a shelterbelt known as the Belt Plantation and extended the parkland with the usual apparatus of the polite landscape, with carriage rides, an icehouse, a ha-ha and, in time, water features. Yet speculation undid them. By 1820, the contents of the house were auctioned to pay for failed canal and tramway ventures. The 4th Baron restored order but died young in 1869, leaving his teenage daughter, Frances Cassandra, as heir without title. She ran the estate shrewdly through the era of agricultural depression and into the First World War, investing in modern services and underwriting village welfare. Her death in 1921 ended two
and a half centuries of Harvey–Hawke control.

The estate could not sustain its pre-industrial scale in a world without staff or agrarian rent. In 1930, it was broken into lots and sold. The house and immediate parkland, further blighted by soldiers billeted there during the Second World War, failed to find a buyer and remained with the Parsons (Earls of Rosse) until 2004. By then, the 15,900-square-foot house was decayed. Stuart and Ruth Evison thus purchased the estate and spent a decade unpicking rot, rebuilding roofs and walls, and re-animating the courtyard, walled gardens and the surviving belts and lawns. It is currently on the market for £5 million.

Address: Womersley, Doncaster DN6 9GA, UK

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Books by Dr Emma Wells