Impeccable manors

Three gracious and beautifully appointed houses in Staffordshire, Hampshire and Gloucestershire have been elegantly presented to the market

- Penny Churchill

IN 1851, an entry in the Gazetteer and Directory of Staffordshire recorded the hamlet of Little Onn, comprising 870 acres of land, 1½ miles south of Church Eaton and eight miles southwest of Stafford, as being 'the sole property of Charles Ashton Esq, who has a pleasant seat here called Rye Hill House'. Now, after more than a century and a half of restoration, the present main house there, set in 28 acres, is for sale through the Midlands office of Fisher German (01530 410840) and Peter James Property in Wolverhampton (01902 754777), at a guide price of £3.5 million.

Ashton inherited the estate when still a minor, following the death in 1844 of his father, whose family had made their fortune in the cotton mills of the North-West. His grandfather, James Ashton, had bought the Little Onn estate with its late-18th-century house from the Crockett family in 1830, the year that Charles was born. Ashton was clearly unimpressed by Rye Hill House; no sooner had he come of age than he set about replacing it with the much grander Little Onn Hall, built in the style of an Elizabethan manor house with tall chimneystacks and crow-stepped gables. A medieval moated site to the northeast of the hall, which includes the remains of a building thought to be part of the original 15th-/16th-century manor house, is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, although the hall itself is unlisted.