Described by Simon Jenkins as 'the most perfect English house to survive from the Middle Ages' - the house is built of Derbyshire gritstone and limestone and the hall seems to have originally followed the plan of a Norman fort with a curtain wall enclosing a courtyard and a defensive tower. In records the house appears for the first time around 1150 and was in the ownership of the Vernon family until passing to the Manners family in 1567.