Hazlewood Castle

The site forms an approximately H-shaped country house built largely of magnesian limestone, standing on two main floors above a basement with roofs covered in Welsh slate and areas of lead. The principal range faces south and is thirteen bays across, with a central block and projecting end bays that give the front its regular composition. A formal flight of steps with an iron balustrade leads to the main entrance, which is framed by Roman Doric columns, a patterned fanlight and a decorated pediment added in a later period; twentieth-century casement windows have been fitted in several openings on this elevation.

At the rear a defensive tower survives together with an arcade of blind round arches that recall the medieval origin of much of the building. Inside, the great hall retains a window that is probably thirteenth century and a rear stair that is likely fourteenth century, testifying to the medieval castle beneath later modifications. Major interior rooms such as the great hall, the drawing room, the dining room and the staircase hall display neo-classical decoration introduced during the mid-eighteenth-century transformation of the house, and that campaign also altered a number of upper rooms.

Evidence of seventeenth-century domestic arrangements remains in the kitchens. An early fireplace survives set within a seventeenth-century opening, and a separate seventeenth-century fireplace is preserved in the rear kitchen. In the 1960s several historic interiors were brought into the house; among these are a Flemish panelled room with decoration produced in the 1670s for a Carmelite church in Ghent, a fireplace and overmantel moved from Eaton Old Hall, and bookcases of probable sixteenth-century origin now used in the library. These inserted fittings form part of the building’s layered interior history.

St Leonard’s Chapel stands close to the main house and was constructed between 1283 and 1285 from the same local limestone, with a grey slate roof. It consists of an uninterrupted nave and chancel, a south porch and a south vestry. A twin bellcote was added to the west gable in 1680, and the porch displays a chamfered pointed arch with a hood mould and a statue of Saint Leonard placed above the entrance. Inside the chapel a west gallery remains, alongside two early fourteenth-century effigies of knights, a fifteenth-century stone alms box fitted with iron doors, a piscina and stoup with trefoil-headed openings, and a small niche intended for a bell; the chapel interior received mid-eighteenth-century refurbishment by John Carr.

Nearby service buildings and garden structures date mainly to the mid and late eighteenth century and are recognised with Grade II protection. The Groom’s House and attached stable range are built of local limestone under a hipped slate roof and present two storeys and a five-bay front with a ground-floor arcade and a Tudor-arched carriage entrance. The former stables rise to two storeys in eight bays, the central four projecting beneath a pediment that contains a circular sundial; several doorways retain patterned fanlights and ground-floor openings display round-arched heads. To the west of the stables a boundary wall incorporates a round-arched opening set within a larger arch framed by imposts and a cornice. A late-eighteenth-century ornamental folly, executed in the same stone, occupies an octagonal plan and shows an embattled parapet, blocked trefoil-headed openings and small blind circular windows above; one doorway is trefoil-headed and another has a later straight head. These ancillary buildings survive in largely intact condition and reflect the eighteenth-century reworking of the estate.