The Country house dates back to 1790 and was originally owned by the Darley family, who still live in the next village at Aldby Park country estate.
The family introduced and owned the celebrated Darley Arabian horse to the UK from Persia. Thomas Darley shipped this Arabian horse back to Aldby Park in 1704 and is widely recognized as being the earliest ancestor of most of the world’s thoroughbred racehorses. The horse sired Flying Childers and is the great-grandsire of Eclipse, There is a life size oil painting of the Arabian horse in the entrance hall of Aldby Park and there are prints of these horses in Morgan cottage.
The house here was a working arable farm until 2004 that had significantly expanded to in excess of a 1,000-acres, when it was purchased by ourselves and completely renovated between 2013 and 2020 as our forever home. It has had only ever had 4 owners, Darley 1790–1954, Silversides 1954–1986, Dixon 1986 -2004 and then ourselves, we have installed named bricks around the property with the different owners’ names.
Up until 1953 the farm was tenanted from Aldby Park and was the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the estate. Back then it was it was a 283-acre tenant farm (along with farm workers cottages). Several generations of the Hughes family (originally from Wheldrake, where Simon grew up) were very successful arable and livestock farmers and often hosted new agricultural innovation demonstrations by the Ministry for Farming. They had quite a workforce and some could live in the farm cottages rent free, in addition they had several servants to look after the family and help at harvest time.
The Silverside family bought the farm at the York cattle market auction in 1954, they farmed it over 2 generations until they sold it to Lynne’s Dad, Dave in 1986. He owned several farms and lived at one of the others, although Lynne used to visit this one as a little girl and play. When Dave chose to retire in 2004, he put the farms on the open market, we purchased this one from him and had tenants living here until 2015. Planning permission and going green took significant time and was quite a hurdle to overcome, even having to go to appeal but we eventually got the permissions needed from the local council and electricity distributors to allow for a full renovation and work started in anger in April 2018 with an amazing building team that had worked for us previously.
A little about us, we have been together since College and University and have spent our careers in several sectors. Due to the nature of the roles we have both held it has usually meant spanning several sectors at once, so a lot of plates to keep spinning! These have included Food Production, Hospitality, Retail, Agriculture, Land Promotion and Development, Property Development, Procurement, I.T., Finance, Utilities, Research & Development, Retail and Private Banking as well as being conduits into certain parts of the Civil Service and Government.
