Walterclough Hall

[citation needed] John Walker (1699–1771) was the squire of Walterclough Hall in the mid-18th century and a woollen factor of great prestige and wealth.

[citation needed] Later, Miss Patchett established a Ladies Academy at Law House, and Emily Brontë taught there for six months in 1837-38.

Elizabeth Ann Gregory ran the academy with her sister, Emma, and their sickly live-in brother, Charles.

Speak, Clara Slack, Alberta Hellowell, Margaret Dempster, Gertrude Glendinning, Annie Bancroft, Elizabeth Wrigley, Amy Percival, and Mary D. Hamilton.

[citation needed] By 1913, when Arthur Comfort sketched Walterclough Hall, it was almost entirely unoccupied and in an advanced state of dilapidation with many broken windows and the interior in disarray.

[10] During the Second World War, Walterclough Hall's windows were shattered by a bomb dropped nearby by a German bomber.

[citation needed] By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the only part of Walterclough Hall which remained standing was the façade onto the yard and the rooms immediately behind it, together with the attached single-storey kitchen.

[citation needed] An oil painting of the kitchen's interior was on display in the Smith Art Gallery in Brighouse during the 1970s.

This painting showed one of the kitchen's unusual features which was a carved stone column which supported one of the roof joists.

Water was supplied to a stone trough in the kitchen floor from a spring, which almost caused the death of one of the children then living at the hall.