Tho. Letherbrow.
Hale Hut.

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Hale, renowned for its cottage–gardens, with lilies and roses beyond the counting, is a quiet, peaceful, salubrious little place, claiming celebrity as regards historical mention long anterior to that of Liverpool. When the site of that wealthy city was known to few but fishermen, Hale, so its people assert, already possessed a royal charter. To–day the archæologist turns with interest to the remains of a mansion which in its way must have been a fitting companion even for Speke—the ancient baronial residence called the Hutte, about two miles upon the Liverpool side of the village, and lying back a little distance from the turnpike road. The great hall was a hundred feet long by thirty feet wide; scarcely anything is to be seen now beyond some of the grand old windows, an ancient chimneypiece, and the moat, with its drawbridge. Hale Church, like the Hutte, tells of a time when the maps did not insert Liverpool.[29] The body dates from about the middle of the last century, but the tower is of immemorial age, contemporaneous perhaps with the vast pile at the western extremity of Ormskirk old church, thus with the very earliest ecclesiastical remains extant in Lancashire. Here, too, we have a beautiful example of the ancient lych–gate.

Soon after the Restoration the Hutte would seem to have been relinquished as a place of residence by the local family. A new one at all events was built in 1674—the Hale Hall of the present day—mentioned above as the seat of Colonel Blackburne. Like many another first–class country–house, in style it is substantially domestic, extremely comfortable to look at, and no doubt well appointed within; but still neither in outline or physiognomy can it be said to preserve the traditions of any particular school of art. The park is spacious, full of fine trees, including many lindens, so valuable wherever men are sagacious enough to set up beehives. It supplies, also, many a delightful prospect, especially when the eye crosses the water and rests upon the opposite distant hills of North–West Cheshire, which are said to resemble very strikingly the rising grounds about Bethany and Bethphage. The gardens have great historic interest, since it was to Hale that the famous collection of plants once existing at Orford Mount was transferred, these including vines now two or three centuries old, but still prolific of grapes. Vines in this healthful village seem comfortable anywhere, mounting, as in the south, to the cottage eaves, and outstripping in their beautiful green ambition even the honeysuckles.