Errington Hall, hidden in the green heart of its noble woods, was a
building of very mixed architecture, displaying in its incongruities
the various dispositions and tastes of the different owners who had
lived therein. The original structure was evidently the large hall
(from whence the building took its name) which had been erected by the
first Errington after the Battle of Bosworth Field, when England was
once more settling down to domesticity, after the tumult and strife of
the Wars of the Roses. To this noble room, lofty, majestic, and
sombre, the various masters of the Hall had added other and smaller
rooms, long, winding corridors, and innumerable outhouses, as the
fancy took them, or as their needs required them, so that the centre
apartment was quite lost amid the huge wings and gables which
surrounded it on all sides. The result was a bizarre combination which
made the old mansion wonderfully attractive to architects and
archeologists, while the lapse of centuries had mellowed the whole
mass into one delicate tone of warm-hued loveliness.
From the central hall, with its carven roof, its long narrow windows,
and quaint oaken gallery, ran many crooked corridors, full of
unexpected angles, queer corners, sudden depressions, and shallow
flights of steps, leading to long ranges of bedrooms, to the kitchen
and the servants' wing. This portion was Elizabethan and the outside
presented the usual Tudoresque aspect of battlements, venerable walls
of grey stone, covered with ivy, diamond-paned windows, and grotesque
gargoyles. After the building of this, the Erringtons were evidently
too busy with the Parliamentary Wars to attend to their home, for the
next portion added to the original fabric was of Queen Anne date, of
dark-hued red brick, wide casements and heavy doors. Again there was
an architectural interval, as the Hanoverian Erringtons were engaged
in making their peace with the new German sovereigns of England for
suspected Jacobite practices, and the last notable addition took place
in the reign of the third George, when the front wing was added to the
house, a vast façade of dull white stone with innumerable windows,
ranges of heavy balustrades, and confused decorations in the
Renaissance style, of nude figures, fantastic flowers, birds, scrolls
and such-like dainty devices. A balustrade ran along the front of the
roof, hiding the leads, and in the centre an elaborate carving of the
Errington coat-of-arms, supported by two greyhounds, with the motto,
"Curro, Capio, Teneo." A broad terrace, with statues and urns thereon,
stretched from end to end, and a double flight of marble steps led
downward to the smooth, green lawn, from whence the great white pile
standing on its hill presented a noble appearance. The Victorian
Erringtons added but little to the house, for the simple reason, that
the builder of the Renaissance wing had not only exhausted the family
resources in doing so, but had encumbered the estate with heavy