Overton Hall is a country house in the parish of Overton

Overton, Cheshire

Overton is a civil parish in the Borough of Cheshire West and Chester and ceremonial county of Cheshire in England. It has a population of 68. It is the site of a deserted village, a Scheduled Ancient Monument, the sole remains of which are earthworks....

, Cheshire

Cheshire

Cheshire is a ceremonial county in North West England. Cheshire's county town is the city of Chester, although its largest town is Warrington. Other major towns include Widnes, Congleton, Crewe, Ellesmere Port, Runcorn, Macclesfield, Winsford, Northwich, and Wilmslow...

, England. The house originated in the middle of the 16th century on a moat

Moat

A moat is a deep, broad ditch, either dry or filled with water, that surrounds a castle, other building or town, historically to provide it with a preliminary line of defence. In some places moats evolved into more extensive water defences, including natural or artificial lakes, dams and sluices...

ed site as a timber-framed

Timber framing

Timber framing , or half-timbering, also called in North America "post-and-beam" construction, is the method of creating structures using heavy squared off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large wooden pegs . It is commonplace in large barns...

 great hall

Great hall

A great hall is the main room of a royal palace, nobleman's castle or a large manor house in the Middle Ages, and in the country houses of the 16th and early 17th centuries. At that time the word great simply meant big, and had not acquired its modern connotations of excellence...

 with a screens passage; it was built for the Alport family. The great hall has since been divided into two floors, and the house was externally refaced in the early 19th century by the Gregson family. Two of the faces of the house are timber-framed with painted brick nogging

Infill

Infill in its broadest meaning is material that fills in an otherwise unoccupied space. The term is commonly used in association with construction techniques such as wattle and daub, and civil engineering activities such as land reclamation.-Construction:...

. The other faces are in brick with stone dressings. The roofs are slate

Slate

Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. The result is a foliated rock in which the foliation may not correspond to the original sedimentary layering...

d with tiles on the ridges. The chimney stacks, porch and bay window

Bay window

A bay window is a window space projecting outward from the main walls of a building and forming a bay in a room, either square or polygonal in plan. The angles most commonly used on the inside corners of the bay are 90, 135 and 150 degrees. Bay windows are often associated with Victorian architecture...

s are in stone. The house has been designated by English Heritage

English Heritage

English Heritage . is an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport...

 as a Grade II listed building. To the south of the house is a stone bridge over the former moat dating from the 18th century. This is also listed at Grade II. Immediately to the east of the hall are the remains of a medieval

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

 and post-medieval settlement and field system

Field system

The study of field systems in landscape history is concerned with the size, shape and orientation of a number of fields. These are often adjacent, but may be separated by a later feature.-Types of field system:...

 that are recognised as a Scheduled Monument.