Country Images Magazine May 2015 - North Edition | Page 17

Sepia drawing by S H Parkins of an unknown Derby house, mis-identified in the
Goodey Collection catalogue as Abbot’s Hill House. [Derby Museums Trust]
Architecturally, Abbot’s Hill was one of Derby’s
more important mansions, being one of a small
group of early 18th century town houses which
all appear to have been designed by the same
architect. We have no certain idea who he was
except that he worked in the style of Francis
Smith of Warwick, architect of Darley Hall
(1727). Another similar house was Castle Fields,
nearby (demolished 1838) and The Friary.
The house was built in about 1720 on a large
area of elevated semi-parkland that lay east of
Green Lane and west of the grounds of Sitwell
Hall (later Babington House), at The Spot, now
the site of Waterstone’s. This was once the park

of Babington Hall, a Tudor (or earlier) mansion
belonging to the Babingtons of Dethick. That
venerable building, wherein Mary Queen of
Scots passed one night in January 1586, was
demolished in 1811, and the land itself was
by then bounded by Babington Lane, a new
street pitched by Derby’s Second Improvement
Commission in 1789. This left a wedge to the
east of Green Lane (then more picturesquely,
and accurately, called Green Hill) on which Dr.
Simon Degge, FRS, FSA began to erect Abbott’s
Hill.
The name has no obvious resonance with any of
Derby’s six whilom monastic establishments and

may have been a conceit of Degge’s, for he was a
keen archaeologist and indeed was the first man
to have excavated the necropolis in the vicarage
garden at Repton, subsequently opened in much
more scientific style by Professor Martin Biddle
in the 1980s. Degge was the great-grandson of
Staffordshire born Sir Simon Degge, who was a
notable Recorder of Derby, who is locally famous
for having spared the life of the waterborne
gentleman counterfeiter Noah Bullock in the
1670s. Dr. Degge also had a country estate at
Stramshall in Staffordshire, so Abbot’s Hill was,
strictly speaking, a town house, or occasional
residence.

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