"This ghost from the past
I tremble to see
Behind me I cast
This ghost from the past,
Life's pleasant at last,
So let there not be
This ghost from the past
I tremble to see."
Errington Hall, hidden in the green heart of its noble woods, was a building of very mixed architecture, displaying in its incongruities the various dispositions and tastes of the different owners who had lived therein. The original structure was evidently the large hall (from whence the building took its name) which had been erected by the first Errington after the Battle of Bosworth Field, when England was once more settling down to domesticity, after the tumult and strife of the Wars of the Roses. To this noble room, lofty, majestic, and sombre, the various masters of the Hall had added other and smaller rooms, long, winding corridors, and innumerable outhouses, as the fancy took them, or as their needs required them, so that the centre apartment was quite lost amid the huge wings and gables which surrounded it on all sides. The result was a bizarre combination which made the old mansion wonderfully attractive to architects and archeologists, while the lapse of centuries had mellowed the whole mass into one delicate tone of warm-hued loveliness.
From the central hall, with its carven roof, its long narrow windows, and quaint oaken gallery, ran many crooked corridors, full of unexpected angles, queer corners, sudden depressions, and shallow flights of steps, leading to long ranges of bedrooms, to the kitchen and the servants' wing. This portion was Elizabethan and the outside presented the usual Tudoresque aspect of battlements, venerable walls of grey stone, covered with ivy, diamond-paned windows, and grotesque gargoyles. After the building of this, the Erringtons were evidently too busy with the Parliamentary Wars to attend to their home, for the next portion added to the original fabric was of Queen Anne date, of dark-hued red brick, wide casements and heavy doors. Again there was an architectural interval, as the Hanoverian Erringtons were engaged in making their peace with the new German sovereigns of England for suspected Jacobite practices, and the last notable addition took place in the reign of the third George, when the front wing was added to the house, a vast façade of dull white stone with innumerable windows, ranges of heavy balustrades, and confused decorations in the Renaissance style, of nude figures, fantastic flowers, birds, scrolls and such-like dainty devices. A balustrade ran along the front of the roof, hiding the leads, and in the centre an elaborate carving of the Errington coat-of-arms, supported by two greyhounds, with the motto, "Curro, Capio, Teneo." A broad terrace, with statues and urns thereon, stretched from end to end, and a double flight of marble steps led downward to the smooth, green lawn, from whence the great white pile standing on its hill presented a noble appearance. The Victorian Erringtons added but little to the house, for the simple reason, that the builder of the Renaissance wing had not only exhausted the family resources in doing so, but had encumbered the estate with heavy mortgages, which his descendants had not yet paid off. Sir Frederick Errington had a turn for amateur gardening, and added long lines of hot-houses to the side of the house, and also a kind of winter garden, while Sir Guy had done his share in the adornment of the place, by building a handsome range of stables. Altogether it was a wonderfully fine place, but far too expensive and costly for the Errington rent-roll, which was not particularly large. So there it stood, a monument of vanity and folly, which often made its present possessor curse his bad luck in owning such a white elephant.