A salvage company stripped out this 1720s Baroque mansion's finest rooms after buying it in 1919, some ending up in an American museum
Open to visitorsan English Heritage site — check opening times and admission before you go
Nicholas Leke, the 4th Earl of Scarsdale, built this grand Baroque mansion between 1724 and 1729, hiring the architect Francis Smith of Warwick to design it around the bones of an older building from about 1469. Italian craftsmen decorated the principal rooms with elaborate plasterwork, and building on this scale left the Scarsdale family deep in debt; by the 19th century the estate had passed to Richard Arkwright junior, son of the cotton-mill pioneer of the same name. Only a roofless shell of towering columns and empty windows survives today.
His descendants sold the hall on in 1919, this time to a company that stripped out its finest rooms and sold them as architectural salvage. Three of those interiors are now on show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a pine-panelled room once owned by the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst later appeared as a set in the 1945 film Kitty, before reaching the Huntington Library in California.
The ruins survived only because the writer Sir Osbert Sitwell bought the house in 1946 to stop it being pulled down for its stone; his family later persuaded the government to take the site into guardianship in 1970, and more recent conservation work has reopened most of the rooms to visitors. The hall opens at set times, though admission is free; Bolsover Castle, also run by English Heritage, is a short drive north-east.
.jpg){kind=link}