Over the years The Friends have devised and funded a number of Projects across the Markenfield Estate. These vary in size and scale from the rebuilding of the Medieval Park Pale to the restoration of Beechey’s portrait of 1st Lord Grantley. Please click on the links below to see their Projects past and present.

Over the years, Markenfield has developed a good reputation in the world of group bookings and coach tours – but over the years coaches have grown larger and longer and indeed wider; and on the one occasion a group og 19 visitors arrived on a 62 seater coach, we discovered that they could get in – but not back out! More…

Sir Fletcher Norton – Baron Grantley of Markenfield, later to become the 1st Lord Grantley – was a forceful and pugnacious Speaker of the House of Commons from 1770 to 1780. Perhaps at times he was a little too pugnacious – his entry in the  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as: more…

The Old Quarry was originally created to cut stone for Markenfield Hall itself, leaving only a short distance to transport the stone up the hill to the site of the house. Over the years the area had been used as an impromptu site for tipping rubbish… more…

Since 2009 The Friends have been working with the Nidderdale AONB Drystone Walling volunteers to rebuild the medieval Park Pale that encloses the site of the Estate’s original Deer Park.

The eastern side of the wall runs along the Old Medieval Road, now a public Bridleway, and was in a bad state of repair. The full length of the wall is Scheduled as an Ancient Monument, as is the ground it is built on and the area it contains. More...