Rossall Hall

In 1733, Margaret Fleetwood, heiress to the Rossall estate, married Roger Hesketh of North Meols and Tulketh Hall, bringing Rossall into the Hesketh family.[4] The couple chose to live at Rossall and it is likely that Roger Hesketh built the hall that existed into the 20th century.[4] Previous houses on the estate were said to have been eroded or swept away by the sea. A chart drawn for Hesketh in 1737 shows a ruined "Old Rossall" slightly north of Rossall Hall.[5] According to John Martin Robinson in A Guide to the Country Houses of the North West, the 18th century hall was a "great rambling whitewashed house", with irregular wings.[6] By the 19th century, it had five family bedrooms, nursery rooms, a drawing room, dining room, libraries and an organ room, as well as servant accommodation and service rooms.[7] The grounds included a workshop, four stables, a shippon, a coach house, an ice house and a gazebo.[7] By the 1830s, the house and estate was in the ownership of Edmund's descendant Peter Hesketh, High Sheriff of the County of Lancashire and MP for Preston, who later changed his name to (Sir) Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood. By 1844, Hesketh had run into serious financial difficulties. He had engaged Frederick Kemp as his agent and the two had considerable financial differences of opinion. Kemp borrowed against the estate revenues to finance the expansion of Fleetwood, and Hesketh became over-leveraged. He was obliged to sell much of the estate, together with Rossall Hall itself. The Hall was taken over by Rev. St. Vincent Beechey and converted into a Church of England boarding school, designed as a Northern equivalent of Beechey's Marlborough College and later to become Rossall School.