PAST CONTINUOUS

The story of Biddulph Old Hall is long, complex and, at times, turbulent. The site of a medieval hunting lodge in Staffordshire was chosen by the wealthy Biddulph family in the 1580s for the construction of a large Elizabethan mansion house. This was razed during the English Civil War and its Catholic occupants banished. All that was left were its crumbling sandstone remains. James Bateman, later the creator of Biddulph Grange Gardens, became the owner of Biddulph Old Hall when he acquired the wider estate in 1861, and he treated it more sympathetically. It was even the home of a Buddhist retreat in the