This image features on the website ”Skelton in Cleveland in History”; it was created from a colour photograph taken by Bill Danby as he did not have an old one at the time to illustrate the facts. If you look to the right you can see the modern PVC conservatory. David Richardson adds: “Rushpool Hall was made of ironstone and was built in 1863 to 1865, at a cost of £100,000 by the late John Bell, who with his brother Sir Lothian Bell (the Bell Brothers) was one of the founders of the Cleveland Iron Industry and the first to work ironstone in Skelton.” Rushpool Hall burnt down (although all the walls remained intact) in 1904. There is an image on the site of the burnt out shell, prior to restoration in 1905. George Sheeran comments: “I find it difficult to believe that this house cost £100,000 to build in the 1860s – what is the source of this figure? According to Bank of England calculations that would be about £11,500,000 today. I could just about believe that it cost something like that to build and decorate and fit out and furnish, but even in the 1860s this would take some doing. The Grand Hotel in Scarborough (built at around the same time) with over 300 rooms and an underground railway to bring in supplies cost something like £150,000 to build according to contemporary newspaper accounts.
Image and details of its creation courtesy of Bill Danby; thanks to David Richardson and George Sheeran for the updates.
I remember visiting Rushpool Hall in 1980 when old Ma (Margaret) Malone lived there with her Borzoi dogs (Russian Greyhounds). I was invited to look round and taken down into the bath house in the cellar which was a real Victorian masterpiece of plumbing and heating. The Hall is indeed built in ironstone, and during the visit I was told that there is, if my memory serves me correctly, 134 fossils that can be seen in the stonework scattered around the outside of the house. It is possible that some of these are now covered by parts added for the hotel that it became.