Rydal Old Hall, was sited on Old Hall Hill (shown here in a drawing by Fred Yates) north of Ambleside when travelling on the A591 towards Rydal.
It first appears in a charter of 1274 where a “motte in the valley” is mentioned as guarding one of the principal routes.
The Old Hall is associated with the Le Fleming family’s deer park and appears in the Gazetteer of Medieval and Fortified Buildings (Perriam and Robinson) although there is no evidence the building being fortified this was, nevertheless, a significant manor house of a major gentry family.
The remains of the Old Hall are too overgrown and fragmentary to determine the shape of the building but it would seem to have had a round turret at the S.E.angle.
The Hall was surrounded by a park within which were orchards and fishponds and the cricket field now exists where these once stood.
By 1575 the Old Hall was in a poor state of repair and the original New Hall buildings were leased to the Le Fleming family in 1576.
