Passing from the great homes of the county, and the older fortified towers, we come to the time when, with the greater security accorded to the minor gentry,
Raby Castle in 1783.
numerous manor-houses and country granges began to rise.
Even at this time, spoiled as the county is for residential purposes, it requires no strong effort of the imagination to picture the county as it was in later Tudor times. The Bishops, greater than ever through the collapse of the Nevilles, still appointed their foresters, and doubtless often made the dales resound with all the view-halloo of a gay hunt. Durham City became a stronghold of great ecclesiastical families, the sons and daughters of the prebendaries intermarrying with one another, and the descendants of successive Bishops allied themselves by cross marriages. In the country better farmsteads became erected, and throughout the shire the landowners began to erect more commodious residences. It is, with one or two exceptions, from this period that the older halls and manor-houses still in existence date. It must not be forgotten that there were at this time no great landowners in the county in the sense that we now understand the term, and almost every village had its own predominating squire.
A few houses still remain, not so strongly built as the peel-towers, yet well adapted to defence. Holmside Hall is one of these. Once one of the principal seats of the great House of Tempest, it was forfeited by Robert of that name, who, with his son Michael, had joined the Earls in their rebellion, and therefore appears in Hall and Humberston’s Survey as a "capital messuage, with all the housings built of stone and covered with slate, with the orchards and gardens, within a park containing three acres." Now sufficient remains to show that once the buildings were ranged round a court and surrounded by a moat. The north side was faced by the chapel containing a still perfect west window of two trefoil-headed lights under a square label, with the cinquefoil of the Umphrevilles and two blank shields in the spandrels. Above the window "a mutilated figure is fixed to the wall, with a full-moony face, and a kind of round helmet," of which Surtees writes: "I should almost conjecture this to be a rude piece of Roman sculpture, removed from the station, which may possibly have furnished the coins and squared stones used in building this chantry."
The house itself is a curiously confused building of many different periods of architecture. The original gables were pulled down and the house enlarged to the south. The windows are mullioned and narrow and guarded with iron bars.
After the Tempests’ fall the estate became the property of William Whittingham, the bigoted Calvinist Dean, whose name deserves perpetual execration as the destroyer of much that was old and beautiful in Durham Abbey. It is possible that in the austere gloom that even now pervades the old house at Holmeside, he might find something sympathetic with his own strange faith.
The Isle, another Tempest residence, stands on low ground, surrounded by marshes caused through risings of the Skerne. It is a picturesque place, with projecting gables and narrow mullioned lights. It was the residence of Colonel John Tempest, first M.P. for Durham County, and still belongs to the Marquess of Londonderry as representative of his family.