The Stables

The Middleton Estate was probably a hunting ground until the sixteenth century. It was a part of Sutton Chase and was stocked with deer. This continued until John Peel, the tenant at the time, had them removed in the nineteenth century. When Francis Willoughby started on his folly of building a new Wollaton Hall he sought to extract funds from any available source. Middleton became a place of work. Early evidence indicates that the land was of poor quality, so it would not have been used for farming. There were extensive woodlands and it was by making charcoal from the wood that Francis hoped to generate an income. He used the charcoal to make iron on the site, as explained in the page on Ironmaking.

Francis did not make a success of his ironmaking enterprise and it was left to his son-in-law, Percival and his grandson, Francis II, to restore the family fortunes. It was Percival who built the Stables, shown above. This building which is a fine example of a late Tudor/early Jacobean house probably provided accomodation for the agent or bailiff, a sort of medieval works manager, who lived over his horses and oxen.

The Smithy

To shoe the horses and to make and repair the implements that were used around the estate and in the ironworks there would have been a smithy. Originally that would have been close to the ironworks, but that had a brief existence (~1575 to 1620) and later the smithy was closer to the house. There is still a smithy on the site in a group of buildings adjoining the small walled garden. It is here that most of the ironwork used in the restoration has been forged.

The Small Walled Garden

This group of outhouses includes a coachhouse, which had rooms above, and a number of workshops. These were probably used for the various crafts carried out to generate income. These included, at various times, making mother-of-pearl buttons from the swan mussel shells taken from the lake, perfume production using the flowers from the estate, making baskets using reeds from the lake as well as the necessary domestic crafts of spinning wool and making cloth and footwear. The rebuilt outhouses are today used to house the Trust's workshops.

Between the back of this group of buildings and the Glade there was an orangery. Only the foundations of this are now in evidence but they serve to remind us of the lengths that were gone to by the well-to-do section of the population to provide themselves with luxuries that the common folk could only dream about.

The Courtyard Centre

Behind the stables is a small courtyard, mainly of modern construction but built on the foundations of the original stables, which houses a group of craft units occupied by a number of excellent craftspeople.