Milnrow & Newhey June 2019

From The Archives
CLEGG HALL
If you are driving towards Milnrow
from the Smithy Bridge side, take a
right off Wildhouse Lane onto Branch
Road. Go as far as you can go and
there by the canal, is Clegg Hall.
The large Grade 2 listed building stands on
the site of a much older building thought
to have been occupied in an area known as
Little or Great Clegg which gave the hall its
name although no Clegg families having
ever lived there. The original hall was built
by Theophilus Ashton, a lawyer and one
of the Ashtons of Little Cleggat some time
between 1610 and 1618. It was described in
a 1626 survey of Rochdale halls and
buildings as “a faire capital messuage (an
old term for dwelling house with land and
outbuildings) built with free stone with all
new fair houses of office there-unto
belonging with gardens, fishponds and
divers closes of land”. In the same record
there was also mention of barns, stables,
courts, orchards, gardens, folds and pigeon
houses. All are agreed about its grand
stature with its 2 storeys, its bay windows
and an imposing entrance porch
and portico.
Subsequent owners were John Entwistle
of Foxholes (and of Entwistle Road fame)
and the Fenton family from Crimble who
operated flannel factories adjacent to the
hall. Water from Hollingworth Lake
powered Fenton’s Clegg Hall Mill which
stood close to the canal. Weavers cottages
nearby housed some of his workforce.
In the 19th century James Tweedale had
a cotton mill on the same site and in 1879
Thomas Wilson bought the mill to spin
cotton waste. By the 19th century, Clegg
Hall itself had reverted to a domestic
dwelling from its role as public house
when the license was removed because
the building was becoming too dilapidated
to continue trading in beer and ales. Later
inhabitants included one Sam Gartside who
was born at Clegg Hall and lived there in
what must have been some squalor from
1917 until 1939.
Best known about Clegg Hall is its
haunting. The earliest accounts of the
Boggart of Clegg Hall appear in the early
20th century in Reverend Oakley’s ‘In
Olden Days’ and concern the murder in
the original hall in the 13th century of two
nephews (although some say a niece and a
nephew) by Richard, the brother of Henry
de Clegg, the master of the house who was
away fighting in one of the Crusades. On
his return, the wicked brother looked to kill
the father too so that he could secure the
hall for himself whereupon one of the dead
boys could be heard calling ‘Father
The occupancy of Clegg Hall was not
always domestic. By the late 19th century it
was used as a country alehouse or inn with
local working people lodging in its rooms.
A Charles Turner owned the hall in the 18th
century and at that time it was the Hare and
Hounds although better known locally as
Black Sloven after Turner’s favourite horse. beware!’ which woke him up.
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