ford Hall,
by purchase from John Entwisle, Esq., the present possessor of
Foxholes, in that neighbourhood.

To Clegg Hall, or rather what was once the site of that ancient house,
tradition points through the dim vista of past ages as the scene of an
unnatural and cruel tragedy. Not that this picturesque and stately
pile, with its gable and zigzag terminations, the subject of our
present engraving, was the very place where the murder was
perpetrated; but a low, dark, and wooden-walled tenement, such as our
forefathers were wont to construct in times anterior to the Tudor
ages. The present building, with its little porch, quaint and
grotesque, its balustrade and balcony above, and the points and
pediments on the four sides, are evidently the coinage of some more
modern brain--peradventure in King James's days. Not unlike the
character of that learned monarch and of his times, half-classical,
half-barbarous, it combines the puerilities of each, without the power
and grandeur of the one, or the rich and chivalric magnificence of the
other; and might remind the beholder of some gaunt warrior of the
Middle Ages, with lance, and armour, and "ladye-love," stalking forth,
clad in the Roman toga or the stately garb of the senator. The
building, the subject of our tale, has neither the gorgeous
extravagance of the Gothic nor the severe and stern utility of the
Roman architecture. Little bits of columns, dwarf-like, and frittered
down into mere extremities, give the porch very much the appearance of
a child's plaything, or a Dutch toy stuck to its side.

It has the very air and attitude--the pedantic formalities--of the
time when it was built. Not so the house on whose ruins it was
erected; the square, low, dark mansion, constructed of wood, heavy and
gigantic, shaped like the hull of some great ship, the ribs and
timbers being first fixed, and the interstices afterwards filled with
a compost of clay and chopped straw, to keep out the weather. Of such
rude and primitive architecture were the dwellings of the English
gentry in former ages: such was the house built by Bernulf and
Quenilda Clegg, in the reign of Stephen, the supposed scene of that
horrible deed which gave rise to the stories yet extant relating to
"Clegg-Hall Boggart." Popular story is not precise, generally, as to
facts and dates. The exact time when this occurrence took place we
know not; but it is more than probable that some dark transaction of
this nature wa