The Ghost Room
The chamber where, so the story goes, an apparition visited the Earl of Newcastle in 1643 and saved Bradford from a massacre.
In the summer of 1643 Bradford was under siege, and the Royalist commander, the Earl of Newcastle, was sleeping in this stone house having resolved to put the townspeople to the sword the next morning. As Bradford still tells it, a woman's apparition came to his room in the night, pleading 'pity poor Bradford', and by dawn he had changed his mind and spared the town. True or not, the room now known as the Ghost Room is still there, and it alone lifts Bolling Hall above the rank of an old house on a hill in a residential suburb. The building is history in layers: a 14th-century defensive tower is the oldest part, a broad 17th-century wing with tall mullioned windows was added later, and after a fire the architect John Carr reworked the interior in the 18th century. The Bolling family held the manor from the Middle Ages, the Tempests for some 150 years after them, and the hall then passed through several owners and tenants before it was given to Bradford Corporation in 1912 and opened as a museum in 1915. Inside are rooms furnished to their own periods, from the old kitchen to a bedroom holding a bed made by Thomas Chippendale for Harewood House, plus the English Civil War displays whose star exhibit, a death mask of Oliver Cromwell, stops more visitors than anything else. Entry is free and so is the car park, which makes this an easy hour or ninety minutes for anyone driving through from Manchester or Leeds. Do not expect a great house on the Chatsworth scale, though: this is a medium-sized, quiet hall where you may well have the rooms to yourself on a weekday, with a small green garden around it that is pleasant for a short sit in summer, and Bowling Park with its little café just over the road. For families, children take to the ghost story and the old kitchen, but the house is all steps and has no lift, so pushchairs stop at the entrance and the two kitchens; the museum also runs a free under-fives play morning on the third Wednesday of each month. It opens Wednesday to Friday 10:00-16:00 and Saturday and Sunday 11:00-16:00, and is closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and bank holidays, which catches out anyone planning a holiday-Monday visit. The hall sits roughly a mile south-east of the city centre: bus 635 from central Bradford drops you on Bowling Hall Road, or it is about a 25-minute uphill walk from Bradford Interchange. In winter it shuts at 16:00 with dusk already falling, so make it an early-afternoon stop.
The chamber where, so the story goes, an apparition visited the Earl of Newcastle in 1643 and saved Bradford from a massacre.
The museum's best-known Civil War exhibit, shown alongside displays on the siege of Bradford.
Period-furnished rooms running from the 14th-century tower to a bed Thomas Chippendale made for Harewood House.
Bowling Hall Road, East Bowling, Bradford BD4 7LP
With a single day, Saltaire and the National Science and Media Museum in the centre come first; Bolling Hall is a free one-hour stop that suits people with a car or a second day, and those who care more about English history and ghost stories than about art and big museums.
Children enjoy the ghost story and the old kitchen, but the house is all steps with no lift, so a pushchair only reaches the entrance and the two kitchens; carry the little one, or time your visit for the free under-fives play morning on the third Wednesday of the month.