11/09/2026
Picture this: it's 1726, and an artist named Henry Beighton is stood in the grounds of Castle Bromwich Hall, sketching what he sees. Except what he's capturing isn't a finished stately home, it's a building mid-transformation. The church tower is up. The stables aren't finished yet (he draws them in anyway, guessing at what they'll look like). Ambition everywhere you look.
That's the engraving here, "South Prospect of Castle Bromwich Hall," a frozen moment in the middle of a story that started over a century earlier.
Rewind to 1599. Sir Edward Devereux builds the original Hall, and twelve years later King James I makes him a baronet for it. Fast forward to 1657, and Orlando Bridgeman, soon to become Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Charles II, buys the estate. It's his descendant, Sir John Bridgeman II, who starts the ambitious rebuild you see caught half-finished in Beighton's sketch, the third storey and the grand alterations that still define the Hall today.
There's even a twist in the family tree: Edward Devereux's great-nephew was the 2nd Earl of Essex, once Elizabeth I's favourite courtier, before it all ended at the executioner's block in 1601.
The Hall stood empty for years before reopening as a hotel in 2011. Which means when you walk through our doors today, you're walking through the same ones that have welcomed guests, weathered rebuilds, and outlived kings, queens and earls since the 1600s.
History doesn't usually let you stay the night. Ours does. π°
Drone footage
