Bell Hall: The unusual treasures discovered at auction from Grade I-listed Yorkshire home

Along with the fabulous furniture, porcelain, paintings and silverware, stately piles such as Harewood House, Castle Howard and Hooton Pagnell Hall throw up some distinctly unusual items.

In more than 30 years of covering auctions, including many country house, attic and barn sales, I have noticed it's the offbeat bits and pieces that intrigue those unable to compete with the deep pockets of dealers and seriously rich collectors.

In 2001, for instance, viewers flocked to glimpse the 1,287th and final lot of the £10 million sale of Sunlight Soap inventor Viscount Leverholme's collection of sumptuous antiques: a 20th century lavatory brush holder. It fetched about £30 if I remember correctly.

From the lofts and outbuildings of other halls, mansions and manor houses have come forgotten veteran and vintage cars that haven't seen the light of day for 60 years; a rare 18th century golf ball known as a feathery (made from boiled goose feathers stitched into a leather sack); letters from Nazi propagandist William Joyce (1906-1946), known as Lord Haw-Haw; an English Civil War cannon; and fearsome early 19th century mantraps used to snare poachers.

Also sold at auction, at Christie's back in 2003, was a unique collection of relics linked to Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), the missionary-explorer of "Dr Livingstone I presume?" fame.

Items unearthed in the attic of a hall in Surrey, untouched and passed down by generations of his family, included the water-stained map carried by Stanley on the 1874-1878 Trans-Africa Expedition during which he traced the Congo to the sea.

In 2005, some 20,000 heirlooms from the vaults and attics of a fairytale German castle at Marienburg and relating to generations of the royal families of England and Hanover, fetched more than £10 million.

Among the eye-wateringly expensive antiques, found in a little-used loft, was a waistcoat with an enormous 56 inch chest measurement, worn by 20 stone George IV.

Under the hammer, too, over the years have gone a bathing tub used by Georgian laundry girls, a cumbersome 19th century spin dryer, a hoard of Victorian metal dog collars, mounted walrus tusks, valuable old comics, including those featuring the first appearances of Batman and Superman, and the world's oldest known surviving cricket whites (waistcoats and breeches in cream-coloured wool from 1780), along with trunks full of centuries-old costumes, shoes and hats worn by ancestors, antique firearms including a Bronze Age sword, pre-war Dinky toys, board games and film posters, stuffed animals and birds, antique fish kettles, jelly moulds, fishing and riding gear.

All of this brings me to the recent sale at Tennants of selected contents from Bell Hall, Naburn, York, the Grade I-listed property built in 1680 for John Hewley, MP for Pontefract and later York. Its architect is believed to be John Etty (1634-1709), father of celebrated York-born artist William Etty (1787-1849).

John Hewley was married to Sarah Woolryche, an active Presbyterian sympathiser and wood panelling in Bell Hall is reputed to hide cavities in the walls where she hid Presbyterian ministers. The hall passed to the Baines family in 1710.

The Bell Hall collection, assembled over several decades and including oak furniture, folk art, 19th century samplers, ceramics, paintings and works of art dominated by animal and bird themes, many of them sculpted by Nick Mackman, a former rhino keeper at Chester Zoo.

The sale produced some decent prices: £6,820 for a 17th century silk and wool Flemish verdure tapestry depicting a rural landscape with hunting lodge; £3,720 for a naive Portrait of a Prize-Winning White Bullock Standing in a River Landscape, in the Manner of John Boultbee (1753-1812); and £2,230-£1,860 for each of three driftwood ornithological sculptures by Guy Taplin, Heron, Canada Goose and Dunlin.

Offbeat lots included an 18th century German hand-coloured celestial chart (£395), six 1970s carved wooden articulated toys, signed Maggie of London (£435), a George III oak commode with dummy drawers (£275), two sets of Victorian stained pine apothecary drawers (£1,055) and a collection of carved and polished marble eggs and spheres (£250).

At the Autumn Sale at Tennants, a stunning 18th or early 19th century Chinese celadon jade carving, Washing the Elephant, depicting two attendants tending to their recumbent charge, which changed hands 75 years ago for £37 10s, realised £4,960.

A similar price was achieved for a gilt and patinated bronze-mounted onyx dining table centrepiece with an urn supported by three putti on a marble plinth.