page_title: Bramall Hall
section_title: First floor
hierarchical_section_title: Bramall Hall / House / First floor
caption_attribution_description: Bramall Hall's withdrawing room
context_page_description: Bramall Hall is a largely Tudor manor house in Bramhall, within the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport, Greater Manchester, England. It is a timber-framed building, the oldest parts of which date from the 14th century, with later additions from the 16th and 19th centuries. The house, which functions as a museum, and its 70 acres of landscaped parkland with lakes, woodland, and gardens are open to the public.
  Dating back to Anglo-Saxon England, the manor of Bramall was first described in the Domesday Book in 1086, when it was held by the Masseys. From the late 14th century it was owned by the Davenports who built the present house, and remained lords of the manor for about 500 years before selling the estate of nearly 2,000 acres in 1877 to the Manchester Freeholders' Company, a property company formed expressly for the purpose of exploiting the estate's potential for residential building development. The Hall and a residual park of over 50 acres was sold on by the Freeholders to the Nevill family of successful industrialists.
context_section_description: The Ballroom, also known as the Upper Banqueting Hall, has an arched roof and according to Dean likely dates from the 16th century. It contains rare 16th-century wall murals, including one which according to Dean may depict the nursery rhyme "Ride a cock horse", and another along the east wall depicting a man playing a mandolin. Above the chapel is the Chapel Room, also known as the Queen Anne Room, the Priest's Room, and Nevill's Room. It had been two rooms, a state bedroom and ante-room, but was almost totally transformed in the late 19th century into one larger room. A blocked-up door next to the fireplace was thought to have been a priest hole, but is more likely to have been the entrance to the first floor of the house from an external staircase before the wing was restructured, probably in the late 16th century or the early 17th century.
  North of the Chapel Room is the Paradise Room, whose name derives from the bed hangings which include embroidered images of Adam and Eve and their fall from paradise, as well as the use in Tudor times of the name "paradise" for a favourite room, often a bedchamber. This room has panelled walls, and a fireplace with a cupboard on the right hand side. On the other side there is a small recess, which was described in an 1882 newspaper as "a dark passage which is said to lead to some region unknown". It is possible that this was a priest's hide, adjacent to the Chapel and Chapel Room. Less romantically, it may, alternatively, have been a garderobe or privy. This room became associated with sightings of ghosts in the 19th century, and legends of a secret passage that led from the room outside or to the Chapel arose, though no such passages exist.
  The largest room on the first floor is the Withdrawing Room, situated above the Great Hall. It has an elaborate plaster ceiling, and the overmantel above the fireplace bears the arms of Queen Elizabeth I. The frieze of the Withdrawing Room incorporates shields of arms representing marriages of the Davenports.
  The northern wing of Bramall came to be the service wing with the kitchen, scullery, butler's pantry, dairy and store rooms on the ground floor and the servants' bedrooms in the attic.
caption: A 19th-century interpretation of how the Withdrawing Room might have looked in the early 1600s
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