Calgarth Park

Image: © David Dixon Taken: 24 May 2014

Calgarth Park is a fine Georgian House built in 1790 by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff (1739-1816). When he bought the Calgarth estate, he didn't like the existing house, Calgarth Hall (now a Grade 1 listed building and owned by the Hedley Stud Farm) and so he used land on the other side of the Trout Beck, to build a suitable house for a bishop. Between 1916 and the end of World War I, Calgarth Park was converted into a hospital for first Belgian and then British officers by the then owner Oswald Hedley. With the end of WWI, the hospital was closed but in 1920, Hedley opened the house as a hospital again, but this time as the Ethel Hedley Orthopaedic Hospital for Children, in memory of his second wife. It had twenty beds but demand was so great that in 1924 he extended the house, building on extra wings and a covered-in balcony. Now fifty children with rickets, polio and TB could be treated. Up until the advent of the NHS, the hospital was funded by the Hedleys and then the Hedley Charitable Trust. The NHS took over but in the 1960s, demand for Calgarth's specialist care fell, as health standards improved, and the decision was taken to close the hospital. From 1970, the house was closed and deteriorating, until it was leased by the Lake District Branch of the British Federation of University Women and converted into self-contained apartments with communal rooms as retirement homes for their members. Calgarth Park is a Grade II listed building (English Heritage Building ID: 452846 http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-452846-calgarth-park-lakes-cumbria British Listed Buildings). http://www.calgarthpark.co.uk/history Calgarth Park website

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