Stockeld's story is one of scandal, decline, rebirth and revitalisation that spans across three centuries.

 

Built between 1758 and 1763, Stockeld was designed by the renowned Palladian architect James Paine, for a wealthy Catholic landowner, William Middleton. Within just a few decades of its completion, however, Stockeld became engulfed in one of the most high-profile and expensive divorce scandals of the 18th century, when William's wife Clara became infatuated with the groom, John Rose. The ensuing divorce became the subject of national media attention and nearly bankrupted the family, with the result that in 1887 the estate was put up for sale and purchased in 1890 by the wealthy industrialist Robert John Foster, scion of the Black Dyke Mills in Queensbury, which subquently became renowned for its world-famous brass band. 

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Foster made substantial alterations to Stockeld, including adding the East Wing and perhaps most dramatically, changing the approach to the house so that what was the back of the property became the front. He also converted the house's internal chapel (a Catholic tradition) into the library and built a separate chapel adjacent to the stables, in which his wife Evelyn was buried. 

 

Upon his death in 1925, Stockeld passed to Robert John's son Gerald, an exemplar of the high-spending, high-gambling 'roaring 20s'. Alumnus of Oxford University and the Bullingdon Club, Gerald lost such a fortune in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that he let off his shotgun into the ceiling of the Morning Room in frustration. His marriage to Olivia Ogilvy in 1914 on the eve of the First World War was a classic union of wealth with a family tree. Daughter of the former military advisor to the Sultan of Morocco, Olivia could trace her  ancestry back to the Earl of Warwick who oversaw the imprisonment and trial of Joan of Arc, and on to the Plantaganet King's of England, and ultimately to William the Conqueror, her 24th great-grandfather. 

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It was during Gerald's tenure that the mansion house was requisitioned as a maternity hospital during the Second World War, and it is reckoned some 5,000 children were born at Stockeld during this period, with many letters and emails being received by them and their descendents asking to come and visit to this day.

 

This was also the period during which Stockeld began to sink into decline. In 1962, the estate passed into the hands of Rosalyn 'Ros' Foster, the eldest of Gerald's four daughters. Ros had not been prepared as well as she could have been for the complexities of high taxes, rampant inflation, and legal entanglements of the post-war world, preferring to dedicate herself to horses, hunting and charitable endeavours, leaving the day-to-day running of the estate to a series of agents and advisors of varying degrees of competence and repute.     

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Ros had no children of her own, and under the terms of one of Stockeld's many and interminably-complex Trusts, the property passed by degrees to her nephew, Peter Grant. By this point in Stockeld's story, much of the estate had fallen into disrepair. Land had been sold to supplement income that wasn't there, many of the tenancy agreements were complex and restrictive, and the profitability of British farming was as good as it always has been. 

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Peter set about the long and arduous process of restructuring affairs at Stockeld, in the teeth of much obstruction from aunts and agents alike, to bring the estate back onto a stable footing. The first major diversification was into Christmas trees, which began in the mid-1980s, and today Stockeld is one of the largest and most successful growers of Christmas trees in England, with some half-a-million trees in the ground. 

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Then in 2007, Peter together with his wife Susie launched the Adventure Park, a seasonal and multi-award-winning visitor attraction that has subsequently grown into one of Yorkshire's most popular family destinations, welcoming some 250,000 visitors every year. 

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In 2024, Peter passed the house and wider estate onto his son George, whose responsibility it now is to further diversify and modernise this extraordinary asset and continue its progress into the 21st century. 

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