On Manor Road, close to Walton’s older core, stands a timber-framed house that predates almost everything else in the town: a genuinely medieval building with a genuinely dramatic piece of seventeenth-century local tradition attached to it.
A medieval timber frame
The Old Manor House dates in its earliest form to the fourteenth century, with substantial alterations made in the sixteenth century, and survives as a timber-framed building with rendered infill panels and a plain tile roof, laid out on a hall-and-cross-wings plan typical of houses of its period. It is Grade I listed, placing it among the small number of buildings in Walton recognised as being of exceptional national architectural or historic interest, alongside St Mary’s Church itself.
Bradshaw’s house
The house’s most enduring local story concerns John Bradshaw, the judge whose signature headed the death warrant of King Charles I in 1649, following the King’s trial for treason. Local tradition holds that Bradshaw leased the Old Manor House and lived there during the period around the trial, and the building has long been known locally, semi-affectionately, as Bradshaw’s House as a result. It is important to be precise about what is established and what is tradition: Bradshaw is generally understood to have leased the property rather than owned it outright, and the house’s connection to him rests on long-standing local report rather than a documented deed naming him as resident. That is not the same as saying the story is false, only that, as with several of Walton’s oldest tales, it should be told as a strong local tradition rather than dressed up as unconditional fact.
A building older than the story
What is not in question is the building itself. Whatever the precise truth of Bradshaw’s residence, the Old Manor House was already two centuries old by the time of the Civil War, and its survival gives Walton a rare, physical link back to the medieval centuries that followed the town’s first appearance in the Domesday Book. Standing on Manor Road today, it remains one of the most visually striking reminders that Walton’s history runs a great deal deeper than its Victorian and twentieth-century streets might suggest.
Sources
- Historic England (n.d.) 'Old Manor House, list entry'. Available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1030163 ↗ (Accessed: 2 July 2026).
- Village Matters (n.d.) 'Charles I, The Old Manor House, and Justice John Bradshaw'. Available at: https://www.villagematters.co.uk/walton-matters/walton-matters-articles/2018/08/charles-i-the-old-manor-house-and-justice-john-bradshaw ↗ (Accessed: 2 July 2026).