Walton Hall: The historic hall which was home to the 'most eccentric Yorkshireman ever'

Waterton established the world’s first nature reserve on the estate surrounding his ancestral home, Walton Hall, by erecting a three-mile-long wall, 16ft high in places, to stop people killing wildlife.

Other conservation measures were more unconventional, such as building a stone tower specifically to encourage starlings to nest, threatening to strangle his own gamekeeper for shooting a barn owl, and trapping foxes which predated ground-nesting birds but then releasing them back into the wild many miles away.

Palladian style Walton Hall was built on the site of a moated medieval hall in the 1760s. An earlier earlier Waterton had been a courtier of Henry VIII.

When Charles inherited the estate at the age of 23 he spent most of the time travelling the world and did not take up permanent residence for another 16 years.

He made the first attempt by a British naturalist to introduce a continental species of owl, the little owl, by releasing five pairs onto the estate after buying them during a visit to Rome in 1842 but they failed to breed.

On the shore of the hall’s lake still stands a structure known as as Waterton’s Watchtower, which he used to observe a heronry. In recent years it was restored by the local Rotary Club.

Now known as Waterton Park Hotel, the hall has in the past served as a maternity hospital.

In 2024 the grounds received a Grade II-listed designation from Historic England because of their status as “the world’s first nature reserve”.