Watkin was a social and political reformer, an anti corn law campaigner and a diarist, recording life in early Victorian Manchester.

He was responsible for driving the expansion of the Metropolitan Railway into the rural areas outside London, and he also founded the Channel Tunnel Company in 1875, which undertook the first large-scale attempt to link England and France.

[8] In 1979 a major landscape painting by the American artist Frederick Edwin Church was discovered at Rose Hill.

The main entrance door has a large fanlight and is topped with a broken pediment supported by Tuscan columns.

[10] Absalom Watkin extended the house in the late 19th century with "a single storey loggia of the finest ashlar with Doric order pilasters ... toy battlements appear elsewhere.