‘A picture of magic beauty’
LEIGHTON HALL enjoys an astonishing setting. Its sloping, saucer- shaped park, with woods of beech, oak and sycamore, frames views over the estuaries of Morecambe Bay to the Lake District fells silhouetted in the distance. It is described in Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh’s Murray’s Lancashire Architectural Guide as ‘a picture of magic beauty, with the distant fairyland of Furness beyond’. The whole scene is the very quintessence of English Picturesque taste, with the early-19th-century castellated façade, built of finely dressed white limestone, looking like an opera set against the sublime landscape backdrop. When the sun shines and the white stone gleams, it seems a barely credible vision (Fig 6). This remarkable house has been the seat of the Gillow family, descended from the famous furniture manufacturers, since 1824.
Leighton is essentially a Georgian house on an older site, re-fronted in the 1820s to give it a Gothic air. The architect for the Regency re-fronting is not known, but the work has been attributed to Thomas Harrison of Chester or Joseph Gandy, who worked at Lancaster Castle (COUNTRY LIFE, ), where the architecture shows similar characteristics. There is no evidence, however, for any involvement
