This cache lays close to the Hall Wood Pond on the fringes of the grounds of the Gresley Old Hall. This is a favourite location for our dogs Logan and Kaiser mainly as its home to the many Grey Squirrels that live amongst the old oaks and hazels, many of which have taken on some twisted and interesting forms, a few with horizontal trunks and plenty of hidey holes! Tred carefully as it is always muddy!
The grounds of Gresley Old Hall are equally as interesting with rumours of ghostly visitors! The house is reputed to have been built in 1556 for Sir Christopher Alleyn out of the materials of the demolished Gresley Priory, but the only survival of the 16th century house is a huge square chimneystack, once external but now encased in brick and within the house. It has four star-shaped brick flues on top of an ashlar stone lower part, all finely built, and there is a bevelled stone dripmould at the junction of the brick and stonework. However, the present building is dated 1664: it is an L-shaped two and a half storey brick house with curved Dutch gables on the south front, and could well be a fragment of a once larger E-shaped house. There are now large, probably 19th century, east and north wings and flat-roofed mid 20th century extensions. As built, the house had mullioned windows, but these have been replaced by unsympathetic steel-framed casements. Inside, the house has a tall and impressive hall with a fine early 18th century staircase rising around three sides of the space. In a cupboard in one of the attic cocklofts a plaster panel with the graffiti inscription "S.A. I.H. 1710" was found recently, which probably provides the date of the 18th century alterations to the house. The initials S.A. have been interpreted as referring to Samuel Alleyn, but since he had not yet inherited in 1710 and was only about ten years old, it is perhaps more likely that S.A. and I.H. were the initials of the craftsmen responsible for the work.
In the mid 18th century the house had an estate of 600 acres and was set in a fenced park, but in 1789 the house was said to be 'hastening fast to decay' and the property was subsequently dismembered for coal mining, the house tenanted as a farm and the outbuildings converted for use as a pottery in 1794. In 1895, when the mining had destroyed too much of the estate for farming to be viable, it was converted into tenements. It then lay derelict for some time before being purchased by a Miners' Welfare club, which employed Vernon Brice ARIBA to make it habitable in 1953. The house now stands in a remnant of the former park, which has been somewhat enlarged by reclamation and landscaping in recent years.