History

The Hotham family in some shape or form came soon after the Norman Conquest and eventually ended up at Scorborough (at what is now the far eastern end of The Dalton Estate). The fortified house that was situated at Scorborough was regularly beset by fire and eventually in the late seventeenth century John Hotham the grandson of the famous “Governor of Hull”, bought South Dalton. The house wasn’t built for almost another hundred years although the garden was laid out almost immediately, the result of work by Thomas Knowlton and Colen Campbell. The house was built in the 1770s and despite a series of massive alterations is more or less back to what it might have looked like when it was first built. The rest of the estate was purchased and acquired over the next century or two and has, like many other comparable estates, waxed and waned as the family fortunes rose and fell.  The enduring presence of the Hotham family at Dalton is particularly key to the mind-set of the estate as a whole, and decisions are often made that won't impact for generations, i.e. buildings going up or coming down, trees being planted and investments in long-term infrastructure that will only produce a return over a period of generations.