Listed Building record MDR5334 - Cutthorpe Old Hall, Cutthorpe, Brampton

Cutthorpe Old Hall consists of the Old Manor House, with the main rooms in three storeys above each other and the staircase in an attached wing, and Old Hall Cottages, the two-storey, two-bay wing to the left. It was built by Ralph Clarke, first Mayor of Chesterfield, d. 1660. (1) Cutthorpe Old Hall is an impressive Jacobean house built in 1625 for Alderman Ralph Clarke of Chesterfield. Essentially a variant of the tower house, but in rather a vernacular vein, it consists of a main range of three storeys and attics containing the main rooms, one above the other, with low mullioned windows. Hood moulds extend into string courses on each floor, quoins and straight coped gables on each side, the whole reached through an attached staircase. The entrance is in the angle, and on the other side of the main block there is a wing of two storeys which boasts a small gable where it meets the main part of the house. The house may once have been larger, for Cornelius Clark, the nephew of the builder, paid tax on 12 hearths in 1670. At some point it seems to have come to the Sitwells of Renishaw, who probably reduced it, adapting it as a farm. From 1752 it was tenanted, at first only the low wing, by the Botham family who farmed the small estate, but who took the whole house over in the 19th century and purchased it from the Sitwells in 1910. The last of the family died in 1982. (3)