The Lost Houses of Lincolnshire - West Willoughby Hall

West Willoughby Hall was was originally built in 18th century in Queen Anne style architecture.  The Rev Charles Wager Allix (1749-1795) bought the West Willoughby Estate in the final years of the 18th century.      

The Rev Allix was coursing (chasing a hare on horseback with dogs) with his servant.  He decided there was time for a ride before dinner.  When they were about a mile from home he started to fall from his horse, his servant caught him and laid him on the ground.  The servant let his horse loose so it could return to the house and his family would know he was in trouble.  At the house no one knew where they were and, eventually the servant left the Rev Allix "senseless and speechless on the ground" and headed to the house on his master's horse to inform the family and bring assistance, then he returned to his master.  The horse smelled the Rex Allix snorted, ran back a few steps, fell on his side and died in less than two hours.  Rev Allix remained unconscious for a week when he passed away.

His son, Charles Allix (1783-1866) developed the farming potential of the estate.  Charles' son, Frederick William Allix, employed Lincoln architect William Watkins to design a new house in place of the original hall.  The new Hall was built in 1873 at a cost of £28,000 using local Ancaster stone.

 It was large and, like most of Watkins' work, elaborate and expansive. Jacobean in style and similar to Dutch and French Renaissance styles. For all its granduer the house was unloved by the Allix family and often tenanted, F W Allix and his wife spent most of their time living in Brussells

F W Allix died in 1894, his wife, Mary Sophia, died in Brussels in 1910.

In 1912 the estate was auctioned to several buyers, except for the house and park. The house was rented then bought by the Rev. H.W.Hitchcock, acting as agent for his eldest brother. 

Practically all of the West Willoughby Estate was sold off in fourteen lots

The house was auctioned in 1928 but withdrawn at £2,750.  

The house remained empty until World War II when it was occupied by the army, the Hall was badly damaged and even used for target practice. 

It lingered on in ruinous state until 1963 when dynamite was used to demolish it. All that remains is a stable block with a datestone of 1876.

The stable block has been renovated and is now (2010) converted to a family home. The extensive grounds have been incorporated as the lawns of the dwelling. The foundations of West Willoughby Hall have been observed by the current occupier (2010) of the stable block during landscaping work that has taken place over the past eleven years. The foundations lie approximately 50 metres to the south-east of the stables. Some former lodges to the hall remain but have been in private ownership for at least thirty years. The front (south) elevation has had an entrance door added beneath a new central Dutch gable which complements the original two. At the rear, large wooden entrance doors have been added to enclose what was previously an open arch, linking the front of the stable building with the rear. {5}

"In 1959 I described Willoughby Hall near Ancaster, Lincolnshire as ‘a tall, gaunt, French-style house of 1873, said to be by Watkins and in ruins’; in 1989 my text was revised to read, “Of the French-style house of 1873 by William Watkins only the stable block of 1876, with shaped gables, remains.’ Today I would further revise my stylistic judgement: I believe Willoughby was a very clever adaptation from local seventeenth-century Northamptonshire and south Lincolnshire models, and that it had also benefited from the Flemish taste of Frederick Allix’s wife Sophia. At the time he was working at Willoughby, Watkins had already built in 1867 the Town Hall at nearby Grantham.

"I had come to Willoughby in the late afternoon from Caythorpe, its walled park and funerary monuments so redolent of the Hussey tenure. Being Lincolnshire, this was RAF country, the domain of ‘Bomber’ Harris. My index card said ‘Mucked up by the RAF — from Cranwell’, but the army were billeted here too. I was puzzled by large numbers at least two feet high painted on the roof and thought of demolition, but learned later that the RAF used the numbers to practise precision bombing in their Mosquitoes. Even from a distance, a spookiness seemed to emanate from the ruin as I approached, a feeling not unlike that which I'd experienced at Bulwell in Nottinghamshire. I knew nothing then of Charles Hitchcock, a lunatic who, cared for by his brother the Reverend Harry, was incarcerated here from 1912 until his death in 1928. It is said that he would appear with a handkerchief on his head, and run away when approached. Another tale is attested to by old Mr Simkins, the Hitchcocks’ gardener. He reported that Charley had the run of the attic floor, and was allowed out into the garden at three o’clock each afternoon, superintended by a maid. Simkins could point to the gabled window on the garden front from which Charley would sing to and stare at the moon — it seems that he would get into a frightful state if there was no moon on a night when he needed its consolation. One such night, he ran up and down the stairs so many times that he finally collapsed exhausted at the bottom. Simkins also claimed that Charley had a passion for Mars bars, which his brother used to supply in bulk. This surprised me, and later enquiries made to the Mars bars people in Slough revealed that the bars had only been marketed from 1932. Maybe Charley’s ghost consumed them? The house was untenanted after Charley’s death in 1928. When the army moved in, a carved French chimney-piece was there one day and gone the next, and according to Simkins, no doubt a local myth-maker, the house was badly haunted. Objects would suddenly break, as if someone had smashed them. ‘A real nasty feeling the place gave,’ he confessed. There were noises in the night, but it was not clear if these were the gasps of soldiers in the embrace of WRACs, or Charley's ghost moaning at the moon.

"Looking back, I don’t believe I have never found a ruin so unpleasant. The back parts had been used as pigsties, and stank from the inevitable muck-heap. In the stables the walls were plastered with army notices. Each stall had housed not horses but soldiers, eating around a table, and the columnar divisions had all been broken up for firewood, as had the balusters of the upper main staircase and the panelling in the dining room. Upstairs, only accessible by sidling along a wall beam over a precipitous drop, the wet rot bulged out of walls like balloons, and the stench of decay was choking. I’m sure Charley had been harmless, but he left a legacy of evil emanations. I felt cold, on this warm summer’s evening"

-- No Voice From the Hall  John Harris

The Stable Block converted to a home

Byards Leap - A Lincolnshire Legend

The legend of Bayard's Leap is locally well-known and is timeless, over the years many versions of the story have been retold; the difference is the hero of the tales, he is a knight, a soldier or a shepherd.  The story I have reproduced below the hero is a shepherd:

"On the old Roman road, called ' Ermine Street,' or ' The High Dyke,' . . . —and at a distance of some three miles from Ancaster, a Roman station . . . —and in the angle formed by the Sleaford and Newark road, which there crosses the Roman road — stands a solitary farm-house; its solitude only relieved by two cottages distant about one hundred yards, on the same side of the great highway, and, more recently erected, a small school building on its opposite side.

"Solitary in its position, its civil status also was formerly isolated, since it belongs to what was an extra-parochial farm, at the north-west corner of Rauceby, sometimes returned with the parish of Cranwell, sometimes with that of Leadenham ; but latterly (under the Act, 20 Victoria, cap. 16) constituted a separate parish in its own right.

"Close by the entrance gateway to this farm-house, on the roadside, is a block of stone, such as not uncommonly may be seen near old houses of the kind, forming two steps, from which a rider mounted his horse. This stone is inscribed with the words ' Byard's Leap.'

"Not less singular are the circumstances which are said to have given rise to the name "of ' Byard's (or ' Bayard's ') Leap,' or the Leap of the horse ' Bayard.' ... It [the Leap] is situated in the midst of what was once a lonely tract of high land, almost a waste, extending for many miles, and called Ancaster Heath. . . . The pedestrian who follows the footpath which runs along the Eastern side of the great Roman highway will observe, at a distance of some fifty yards northwards from the farmhouse of Byard's Leap, and near a pond by the roadside, four very large iron horseshoes, embedded in the soil. If he measures the distance of these shoes from the pond he will find that it is twenty paces or sixty feet, and sixty feet was the length of Byard's Leap. . . . Opposite the farm of ' Bayard's Leap ' is a plantation . . . consisting chiefly of trees of recent growth; but probably there formerly existed an older growth, whose pristine shades were more adapted to harbour weird spirits.  Within that wood, inhabiting, as it is said, a cave, but more likely a deserted quarry of the famed Ancaster stone of the district (such places of abode being still used), there lived the pest and terror of the countryside in the person of an old woman, known far and wide as, par excellence, the witch ... a dangerous character was the old beldame to anyone who ventured to thwart her or cross her path. ...

An alternative tale

"If the old woman was denied anything which she craved, of her better-to-do neighbours they were certain speedily to suffer for it. . . . Neither man nor beast is secure from her spells. ... At length, a child having been stillborn in a cottage from which the old woman had been turned away without receiving what she asked for, the indignation ripens, and a plan is proposed, by which it is hoped that the witch's power may be put an end to, while the act shall seem to be of her own originating. The shepherd of the farm has been on something like intimate terms with the old woman, ... as is surmised . . . having had illicit dealings with her, the result, however, being that closer acquaintance with her has in no wise enkindled affection: and although afraid to ' break ' with her ... he would yet greatly rejoice ... if he could terminate the unpleasant thraldom of her influence. . . . By a sort of lottery, the shepherd is selected for the enterprise. He is to lead out the farm horses to water in the evening, at the pond by the roadside, opposite to which is the hag's den.  He is to throw a stone into the water as the horses are drinking, and whichever horse then raises its head first, he is to mount. He is to be armed with a two-edged knife.  He is to call to the old woman to come out and mount behind him. He is to stab her when she has done so as if in self-defence on her springing up behind him; it is hoped that in the struggle she will be drowned; the not unfrequent end of witches. At the appointed time he proceeds to carry out these instructions. The horses are led to the water, the stone is thrown into the pond. The first horse that raises his head on hearing the splash is the blind Bayard; a providential circumstance, since it is likely that any horse which could see would shrink from contact with the witch. 

"He mounts the horse Bayard.  He calls out to the old woman, asking her to come and ride behind him. Her reply (which has been preserved) is, ' Wait till I've buckled my shoes and suckled the cubs, and I'll be with you.' He waits, and in due time she comes forth. At his bidding, she mounts behind him.  He at once plunges his knife into her breast. The old hag, in her agony, clutches at the horse's back with the long sharp nails of her fingers. The horse in alarm makes one wild, sudden bound, which lands him full sixty feet from the spot. The witch falls back into the pond and is drowned, so her career is ended.

"Tradition says that the horse made a second bound, equal in length to the first, and which brought him to the corner of the cottages which stand further on by the side of the road ; but only the first is marked by the four huge horse-shoes, which are carefully preserved, in situ, as described above, as standing evidence and memorial of ' Bayard's Leap.' . . . It should here be stated that considerable variations from the foregoing version of the legend exist, as is usually the case with such narratives, in the form of oral tradition still floating in the neighbourhood. For instance, the personality of the hero himself varies from that of a knight-errant of the age of chivalry to that of an ordinary cavalry soldier of a more recent period. . ."

"The Legend of Byard's Leap" - Rev J Conway Walter

(Bayard is Old English meaning horse)

For many years the leap and landing points were marked by holes in the ground, these holes were probably marked parish boundaries and would be re-established at the annual "beating of the bounds".  

In the mid-19th century the then Colonel Reeve of Leadenham had three sets of horseshoes made by Bradley and Howitt of Newark.  The horseshoes were set in concrete and set in the legendary positions.

In the early 1960s the A17, a trunk road from King's Lynn to the A1, was straightened at Byard's Leap and the third set of horseshoes was in the direct route of the road.  This set of horseshoes was put into storage at Wilsford, several years later they were returned and placed near to Byard's Leap Cottages on the north side of the A17.  

Map showing the re-alignment of the A17

Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland