page_title: Cliffe Castle Museum
section_title: The building
hierarchical_section_title: Cliffe Castle Museum / History / The building
caption_attribution_description: English: Cliffe Hall, later Cliffe Castle
context_page_description: Cliffe Castle Museum, Keighley, West Yorkshire, England, is a local heritage museum which opened in the grand, Victorian, neo-Gothic Cliffe Castle in 1959. Originating as Cliffe Hall in 1828, the museum is the successor to Keighley Museum which opened in Eastwood House, Keighley, in c. 1892. There is a series of galleries dedicated to various aspects of local heritage, and to displaying the house itself, which is a Grade II listed building. Entrance to the museum is free of charge.
context_section_description: Cliffe Hall was built by Christopher Netherwood between 1828 and 1833, and designed by George Webster of Kendal, a gothic revivalist. The Butterfields, a textile manufacturing family, bought Cliffe Hall in 1848. Henry Isaac Butterfield transformed the building by adding towers, a ballroom and conservatories from 1875 to 1880, and renamed it Cliffe Castle in 1878. He decorated the building with the griffin motif, which he had adopted as a heraldic crest. Sir Nicholas Pevsner describes the building as having an asymmetrically placed tower and Jacobean shaped gables.
  By 1887, the Cliffe Castle Estate had around 300 acres. The son of Henry Isaac Butterfield (1819–1910) was Sir Frederick William Louis Butterfield (1858–1943). In 1916, Sir Frederick became Mayor of Keighley and held that title until 1918 when he hosted a visit to the town by King George V and Queen Mary on 29 May of that year. Sir Frederick's daughter,  Marie-Louise Roosevelt Butterfield (1889–1984), married in 1918 and later became Marie-Louise Roosevelt Pierrepont, Countess Manvers. Sir Frederick died in 1943 and on 21 July of that year his daughter Marie-Louise, Countess Manvers inherited the Cliffe Castle Estate and took some of the contents of Cliffe Castle to her home at Thoresby Hall.
  In 1949, the building and grounds were bought by Keighley Corporation with the assistance of Sir Bracewell Smith, a local benefactor, who in 1955, paid for the conversion of the house for public use.  The house had been gabled in the neo-gothic style, with tall towers each end, and conservatories. In the interests of modernisation, the back tower was taken down, and the front one shortened. The high Flemish gables and other decorations were removed from the roof, and the conservatories demolished. The service rooms were replaced by the octagonal art gallery in the 1950s. The exterior fantasy design was lost but some of the neo-gothic interior has been recreated. By 1989,  Thoresby Hall, the former home of the late Countess Manvers, and its contents, had been sold off. Various artefacts were brought back to Cliffe Castle from where they came with the help of a public appeal.  Some items were borrowed and are also displayed in the museum.
caption: Cliffe Hall, later Cliffe Castle, circa 1880
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