A concealed chamber something after the same description is to be seen at the old seat of the Fenwicks, Wallington, in Northumberland—a small room eight feet long by sixteen feet high, situated at the back of the dining-room fireplace, and approached through the back of a cupboard.
Behind one of the large panels of "the hall" of an old building in Warwick called St. John's Hospital is a hiding-place, and in a bedroom of the same house there is a little apartment, now converted into a dressing-room, which formerly could only be reached through a sliding panel over the fireplace.
The manor house of Dinsdale-on-Tees, Durham, has another example, but to reach it it is necessary to pass through a trap-door in the attics, crawl along under the roof, and drop down into the, space in the wall behind a bedroom fireplace, where for extra security there is a second trap-door.
BROUGHTON HALL, STAFFORDSHIRE
ST. JOHN'S HOSPITAL, WARWICK
Full-length panel portraits of the Salwey family at Stanford Court, Worcestershire (unfortunately burned down in 1882), concealed hidden recesses and screened passages leading up to an exit in the leads of the roof. In one of these recesses curious seventeenth-century manuscripts were found, among them, the household book of a certain "Joyce Jeffereys" during the Civil War.
The old Jacobean mansion Broughton Hall, Staffordshire, had a curious hiding-hole over a fireplace and situated in the wall between the dining-room and the great hall; over its entrance used to hang a portrait of a man in antique costume which went by the name of "Red Stockings."
At Lyme Hall, Cheshire, the ancient seat of the Leghs, high up in the wall of the hall is a sombre portrait which by ingenious mechanism swings out of its frame, a fixture, and gives admittance to a room on the first floor, or rather affords a means of looking down into the hall.[1] We mention this portrait more especially because it has been supposed that Scott got his idea here of the ghostly picture which figures in Woodstock. A bonâ-fide hiding-place, however, is to be seen in another part of the mansion in a very haunted-looking bedroom called "the Knight's Chamber," entered through a trap-door in the floor of a cupboard, with a short flight of steps leading into it.