Condover Hall

Owen died in 1598 before the new hall was completed and its designer remains a matter of debate. Another Shropshire landowner, Francis Newport employed Walter Hancock in his building projects, and on 11 November 1595 he wrote from High Ercall to the town council of Shrewsbury, recommending Hancock be employed to build a new market hall. He said that Mr Justice Owen would have made the same recommendation, if he were in the county at the time. Built out of pink sandstone, quarried at nearby Berriewood, Condover Hall has typical Elizabethan two-storey ground-floor rooms lit by tall windows with regular mullions and double transoms. There are fine chimneys, gables and a good example of a strapwork frieze. The grounds are laid out in formal 17th-century style with boxed yew hedges and sandstone balustraded terraces decorated with Italianate terracotta vases. Near the Cound Brook is a flagstaff held by a sandstone gnome. ==Later years==

Owned by the Owen family until 1863, the house then passed to the Cholmondeley family, Her uncle, Reginald Cholmondeley (1826–1896), owned the house when it was visited by the American writer Mark Twain (1835–1910) in 1873 and 1879. The house and estate was sold by the family in 1897 to Edward Brocklehurst Fielden, who sold it on in 1926. – no heir to Condover Hall will prosper since the hall was cursed from the gallows by a butler falsely accused of murder; he had been condemned by the lies of the son of Knyvett, lord of the manor, who stabbed his father to death. Knyvett's bloody handprint on a wall allegedly defied all attempts to wash it away. In 1930 a Great Western Railway Hall Class 4900 steam locomotive, No. 4915 with a 4-6-0 configuration, was named Condover Hall, remaining in regular service until 1965. In the 1980s Hornby toys issued an electric toy replica of the engine. The train used in the Harry Potter films as the Hogwarts Express is an identical Hall class locomotive. On 21 August 1994, Rail Express Systems liveried Class 47/7, No. 47784 was named Condover Hall at the Crewe Basford Hall Yard open day. ==Second World War==

Between August 1942 and June 1945 the hall was commandeered by the War Office and used as the officers' mess for nearby RAF Condover. ==Residential schools==

In 1946 the hall was purchased from its then owner, William Abbey, by RNIB and operated as Condover Hall School for the Blind, Condover Horizon school closed in January 2009, and Farleigh College Condover closed on 23 July 2009. In 2011 JCA Adventure bought the house, and it now hosts children's residential adventure holidays. ==See also==