This post is taken from Historic House Magazine Summer 2023.

The article refers to the restoration builder “Irvine Hargraves”. Irvine’s son lived in Burnsall and his grandson, also called Irvine, lived in Grassington until he passed away last year.

The “Northern Horticultural Society” gates are still at Harlow Carr and can be seen in the outdoor part of the shop. They line up with the Columned portico in the woodland area of the Gardens.

Among bare slopes of close-cropped grass in the Yorkshire Dales, the gardens of Parcevall Hall stand out like an oasis. An astonishing variety of specimen trees frame a little piece of paradise on the banks of the Skyreholme Beck, an island of exuberance in an otherwise starkly beautiful landscape.

At the heart is a manor house of the most typical vernacular fashion of the Dales — low and long, the warm coursed-rubble walls fenestrated with mullions capped with dripstones. Both before and after the Reformation — when it passed from monastic to private ownership — this was a genteel farmhouse tenanted by yeoman farmers.

Sometime between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, however, as local agricultural conditions worsened, the house began to suffer indignities, perhaps including division into multiple dwellings, each with their own entrance.

Photographs from the 1920s show the various parts of the house ranging from run down to practically ruinous.

Parcevall’s extraordinary renaissance — metamorphosis is maybe more accurate — was the work of one man, Sir William Milner. Milner came from a family of Yorkshire baronets, but his father, a Conservative MP, was forced to sell the family seat, Nun Appleton, at the end of the nineteenth century, to cover the debts run up by his elder brother, from whom he had inherited.

As a young man emerging from service in the First World War, Milner became a devotee of the Anglo-Catholic movement. He got to know Father Alfred Hope Patten, vicar of Great Walsingham in Norfolk, and became secretary of the ‘League of Our Lady’, which supported Hope Patten’s plans to restore Walsingham’s medieval shrine.

He adopted a deeply spiritual life — dedicating himself to celibacy, for example — and devoted much of his wealth to the Walsingham project (including donating the land on which the ‘new’ shrine, completed in 1938, would be built). But he was clearly still drawn to his ancestral county, spending much time in Yorkshire cycling and painting in the company of his friend, the Chinese artist and author Chiang Yee. A physically impressive man — standing at a broad six feet and seven inches tall — William became a familiar figure in Wharfedale.

In 1927 he decided to settle there permanently, buying Parcevall Hall with the intention of creating what his local builder, Irvine Hargraves, described as, ‘a bloody mansion.’ Indeed, Milner didn’t just restore the dilapidated farmhouse — he more than doubled its size through the addition of two new wings, transforming the traditional longhouse’ layout into a ‘U’ shape around a courtyard. Reclaimed and rescued materials from Parcevall and other buildings were used wherever possible to sensitively match the existing structure and give a seamless Impression of age to the finished house. The work was expensive and the scale of it was much appreciated by the local community at a time when the Depression made work scarce.

Milner’s interest in the gardens began as architectural — the terraces, which extend the formality of the house into its grounds, were his earliest creations — but he soon showed himself a gifted plantsman. The protective girdle of trees that swaddle the house and soften the potentially bleak upland setting not only break the skyline and the wind, but also, with their mix of deciduous and coniferous, native and non-native, provide year- round interest through foliage, blossom, and colour.

In 1949 Sir William was one of the founders of the Northern Horticultural Society, which was to create the gardens at Harlow Carr, near Harrogate; in 1955 he became the Honorary Director of the gardens. Visitors to both Harlow Carr (now one of the RHS’s five gardens following a 2001 merger) and Parcevall Hall will notice similarities that reveal some of Milner’s approach to garden design.

He liked to create surprises for the casual visitor taking a walk through a garden; the doorway to the terrace at Parcevall opens, with great success, to an unexpected vista. Other sections are ‘secret’ gardens, tucked away awaiting discovery by explorers. One such, surrounded by a beech hedge and enlivened by Tibetan cowslip (Primula florindae) and Himalayan poppy (Meconopsis betonicifolia), contains Sir William’s private chapel, still in use today.

As the garden moves away from the semi-structural formality of the pergola adorned with roses and camellias and the espaliered laburnum against the wall of the house, shrubberies become woodland gardens rich in rhododendrons and carpeted with daffodils and narcissi in spring.

Milner was a hands-on gardener, too, as well as a directing force — often to be found in the potting shed, where the height of the benches was customised to be more comfortable for his towering frame.

Living parsimoniously, and deliberately anachronistically, in his house heated only by open fires and sleeping in a sixteenth- century four-poster, Milner gave away huge sums to charitable causes, central to them being the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. Despite this generosity, successful investment kept him a rich man.  Several years before his death, childless, in 1960, Milner had arranged for Parcevall Hall and its grounds to pass in trust to the Guardians of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, who today lease the house to the Diocese of Bradford, which uses it for retreats and residential courses.