I had the life-changing good fortune to pass my eleven-plus exam, which was my free ticket to a grammar-school and university education.

I attended Swanwick Hall Grammar School, Derbyshire, from 1959 to 1966 – a pivotal period in the history of the school.

When I arrived it had recently lost its headmaster, Herbert Scarborough, who resigned during a public controversy over the County Council’s plan to turn the school into a comprehensive – a transition that eventually began some years after I left.

I enjoyed history consistently through school (though I read English at university), and in the sixth form my circle of friends took an interest in the history of the building – a brick-built Georgian villa with Victorian extensions – and the family that lived there.

We were actually in search of the Grey Lady who glides – as the big kids always told the little kids (and do to this day) – down the main staircase at dead of night.

In the absence of any kind of digital technology, we pieced together what information we could from local churchyards, books in the local branch library and then visits to the Local History Library in Derby.

In Derby Art Gallery we found Joseph Wright’s portrait The Wood Children (1789), which had hung in the Hall, and eventually found a real live member of the Wood family, who had been a girl when the house was sold to become the School in 1920.  She put us in contact with another family member who had other portraits, none of them attributed to Wright.

Decades later, we discovered from the writings of the Derby historian Maxwell Craven that the Hall was designed by a prolific local architect, Joseph Pickford (c1734-1782), for Hugh Wood (1736-1814).

The family had owned coal-bearing land locally for centuries, and their social status rose gradually from yeomen to gentry.

At the end of the eighteenth century Hugh Wood’s older brother, Rev John Wood, was chaplain to the Duke of Devonshire, which helped Hugh’s eldest son, another Rev John, to two livings, Kingsley in Staffordshire and Pentrich in Derbyshire, a mile or so away from Swanwick.  It can’t be accidental that the Bachelor Duke appointed Rev John Wood to be Vicar of Pentrich in 1818, the year after the abortive Pentrich Rising.

One of the younger Rev John’s sons, Edward, was a lieutenant in the army of the East India Company and was killed at the Battle of Miani in 1843.  His memorial is in the chancel of Pentrich Church.

His youngest brother, William, emigrated to Canada, settling at Nanticoke on the shores of Lake Erie.  Members of subsequent generations of the family went to join their Canadian cousins.

Terry Thacker and I wrote up our researches which the School published as The Story of Swanwick Hall (1972).

We have a possible candidate for the identity of the Grey Lady, but we see no reason to provoke a new generation of Swanwick Hall students to embark on extracurricular ghost hunts – as we did in the late 1960s.

Eyam Hall, Derbyshire

Eyam Hall has been occupied by the Wright family ever since it was built by Thomas Wright as a wedding present for his son John, who married Elizabeth Knyveton in 1671.

Thomas’s father William had bought extensive land and lead mines in Eyam in 1633, and the family can trace their ancestry back to the thirteenth century in nearby Great Longstone.

The Hall is a fine example of a Derbyshire vernacular manor house, and its contents, accumulated over generations, remain intact, such as the two bacon settles beside the hall fireplace and the series of family portraits that begins with Elizabeth Knyveton and her parents and sister.

The fine dogleg staircase with its ball finials and fiercely pointed pendants, is thought to be earlier than the building in which it stands.

This well-chronicled family history runs up to the present.  The current owners, Robert and Nicola Wright, the eleventh generation of owners, opened the Hall to the public in 1992 and created the craft centre, café and shop in the stable yard.

They leased the Hall to the National Trust in 2013, and four years later the Trust is giving up its tenancy.

The new direction is indicated by a new website:  http://www.eyamhallweddings.co.uk.

Calke Abbey, Derbyshire

Calke Abbey sits oddly in its low lying setting, chosen by Augustinian monks when they built their priory c1131.  (Like Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, Calke was never an abbey until long after it became a rich man’s house.)

The present house was built in 1701-4 by Sir John Harpur, the fourth baronet, whose father had had the great fortune to inherit the estates of his great-grandfather’s various descendants, and the misfortune to die when his son was little more than a year old.

No known architect has been identified for Sir John’s externally impressive but internally inconvenient house.  His neighbour Elizabeth Coke remarked of some misdeed that “like Caulk House, the thing is done but nobody did it”.

Sir Henry Harpur, the eccentric seventh baronet, married a lady’s maid and became so reclusive that he was known as the “isolated baronet”, yet changed his name to Harpur Crewe in the vain hope of reviving a long dormant Crewe barony.

His son, Sir John Harpur Crewe, 9th baronet, was – according to his epitaph – “averse to a public life and spent the greater part of his days at Calke among his own people…”

His son, Sir Vauncey Harpur Crewe, 10th and last baronet, was descended from the isolated baronet through both his parents, and in him the trait towards reclusiveness became extreme.

From inheriting the estate at the age of forty in 1886 until his death in 1924 his only major contribution to local life was to take his turn as High Sheriff of Derbyshire in 1900.

Like the burrowing Duke of Portland he had more time for his tenants and workers than for his peers, and communicated with his children by letter:  eventually he turned his only unmarried daughter out of the house for smoking.

No motor-car passed the gates of Calke Park in his lifetime, and though he repeatedly sacked servants for keeping fires too hot for his collection of stuffed wildlife they were easily re-engaged because he did not know one from the other.

At his death the property passed to his sister, Mrs Hilda Mosley, and from her to her nephew, Charles Jenney, another shy bachelor who changed his name to Harpur Crewe in 1961.

He left his younger brother Henry (who also changed his name to Harpur Crewe) with a tax burden of £8,000,000 when he inherited in 1981.

Henry Harpur Crewe’s determination to save Calke as a unique historic site attracted the support of the National Trust, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Historic Buildings Council and SAVE Britain’s Heritage.  Eventually the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, promised £4,500,000 towards endowing the house and park in his 1984 Budget Speech to keep the place intact.

The house was substantially as it had been left in 1924;  Sir Vauncey had done little but add cases of stuffed animals since his father died in 1886.

Here was the accumulated bric-a-brac of generations of country-house inhabitants and their servants, yet little of significant artistic value except for the most astonishing survival of all, the State Bed, still in its original packing because no suitable family room had height enough for it.

Many thousands of items had to be catalogued, photographed and removed for safe-keeping while the structural restoration of the building was carried out.  Alongside heavy engineering to stabilise the building, enormous care was taken to retain the largely undisturbed patina of the nineteenth century.

In the Drawing Room the chairs had been covered for almost their entire lives, so their textiles were revealed in superb condition, but the curtains, continually exposed to daylight, simply disintegrated and had to be woven anew to the original pattern.  The original linen-backed wallpaper, dating from around 1855, had to be stripped and then put back on the wall.

When the little pot pug dog with the broken foreleg was returned to his place in the entrance hall, the matchbox that had been found propping him up went back into place also.

Calke is a memorable place to visit [http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/calke-abbey], now restored in “as found” condition like the much smaller Mr Straw’s House in Worksop.

Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire: east wing

The Sitwell family have lived at and owned Renishaw since the 1301. Of the owners who built and embellished Renishaw Hall, the one who aggrandised the house most was Sir Sitwell Sitwell.

The male line of the Sitwells ended with the death of the second of two bachelors in 1777 and the property, said to be worth half a million pounds, passed to a nephew in the female line, the lively, musical Francis Hurt of Mount Pleasant, Sheffield, who took the surname Sitwell.

It happened that Francis had already named his heir Sitwell Hurt, so that he duly became Sitwell Sitwell. (There was a younger son named Hurt Sitwell.)

Sitwell Sitwell, who inherited an income reputed to amount to £40,000 a year, immediately began extending the house with the help of the Sheffield architect, Joseph Badger, adding the pillars which widened the Jacobean hall, and in 1793 building the apsed dining-room extension with its chimneypiece by John Platt of Rotherham. Badger also constructed the Dairy, the Gothick Temple and other estate buildings.

In 1803 the east wing was begun, including the drawing room, which contains the earliest plasterwork attributed to Sir Francis Chantrey and a chimneypiece by Sir William Chambers, originally in the Albany, Piccadilly, which Sitwell Sitwell purchased from the Duke of York.

He erected the stables to the north-west of the house (also by Joseph Badger) to accommodate his racing stud, his hunters and the hounds which in November 1793 had famously chased and captured a “Royal Bengal Tiger” escaped from a nearby menagerie.

The Prince Regent visited Renishaw with his daughter, Princess Charlotte, in 1808 and made Sitwell Sitwell a baronet. The ballroom, which contains another of the Albany fireplaces, was completed for this occasion:  its ceiling is embellished with the Prince of Wales’ feathers.

Sir Sitwell Sitwell died, of gout or of its treatment, aged 41, in 1811.

Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire: south front

Of all the eccentrics associated with Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire, Sir George Sitwell (1860-1943), whose legend was immortalised by his three famous children, Dame Edith (1887-1964), Sir Osbert (1892-1969) and Sir Sacheverell (1897-1988), is my favourite.

He appeared oddly myopic about the roots of his prosperity:  Evelyn Waugh describes him standing on the terrace at Renishaw gesticulating towards Barlborough across the “farms, cottages, villas, the railway, the colliery and the densely teeming streets” and remarking, “You see, there is no-one between us and the Locker Lampsons.”  His children, however, told of sitting in the quiet of a Renishaw evening, listening to a faint tapping below which came from the miners hewing the black wealth beneath their feet.

He had a toothbrush that played ‘Annie Laurie’, and a miniature revolver for shooting wasps.  He considered stencilling blue willow pattern on the white cows in the park, “to give distinction to the landscape”, but found it impractical.  His schemes for estate improvements were never ending.

He had a passion for gardening, and began altering the surroundings of Renishaw in 1887.  He also had a passion for local history, particularly when its minutiae illuminated the distant doings of his remote ancestors.  Sir Osbert said that his father was “adept at taking hold of the wrong end of a thousand sticks”;  John Pearson commented that “much of Sir George’s life was…spent correcting experts”.  He was particularly proud that he “captured a spirit at the headquarters of the Spiritualists, London, 1880”.

He passed on a considerable share of eccentricity to his children, some of it deliberately:  he advised Edith on one occasion that there was “nothing a young man likes so much as a girl who is good on the parallel bars”.  She it was who in her youth at Renishaw once disguised herself as an armchair, covered in a dustsheet, in order to be carried upstairs by her brothers to avoid an aunt.  Sir Osbert described himself as “educated during holidays from Eton”.

Sir George befriended the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and brought him to Renishaw repeatedly:  Sir Reresby Sitwell describes Lutyens’ effect on his grandfather’s plans as “restraint rather than…guidance”.  It was on the Sunday morning of one of these weekend visits that Lutyens asked the butler, “Is Lady Ida down?”

From 1909 onwards Sir George became increasingly preoccupied with the restoration of the castle he purchased at Montegufoni in Tuscany, until eventually in 1925 he moved out there permanently, and handed over Renishaw to his eldest son, Osbert, and his other English estate, Weston Hall, Northamptonshire, to Sacheverell.

His nephew, the late Sir Reresby Sitwell (1927-2009), carried on the tradition of celebrating eccentricity, particularly the manifest oddities of his grandfather.

Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire

You would not mess with Bess of Hardwick.  Her descendant, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, described her as “hideous, dry, parched, narrow minded, but my prudent, amassing, calculating buildress and progenitrix” and Edmund Lodge, an eighteenth-century historian, characterised her as “…a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish, and unfeeling”.

She outlived four husbands, each of whom enriched her.  By her second husband, Sir William Cavendish, she was the direct ancestor of two great dukedoms, Devonshire and Newcastle, and indirectly a third, Portland.

She bought the estate of her yeoman father from her debt-ridden older brother and extended the manor house in which she was born into a splendid hill-top tower-house, Hardwick Old Hall.

No sooner had her fourth and final husband, George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, expired in 1590 than she began work on one of the most adventurous of all Elizabethan houses, Hardwick New Hall, the finest work of the architect Robert Smythson.  She moved into the New Hall in October 1597 and there she died on February 13th 1608.

Built almost entirely from the materials of her extensive estates, exuberantly exhibitionist and famously “more glass than wall”, its most audacious motif is the series of strapwork parapets around the turrets, emblazoned with her initials ES (Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury) and her coronet.

Several of the turrets served as banqueting houses, for the serving of desserts in the open air on summer evenings.

When, in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Capulet urges his guests to stay longer, he tells them, “We have a trifling, foolish banquet toward.”  In the Elizabethan way, he was giving them the menu in a witty conceit.

Hardwick Old Hall is in the care of English Heritage:  http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/hardwick-old-hall.  Hardwick New Hall and the surrounding gardens and park are maintained by the National Trust, who are extremely proud of their new visitor centre:  http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hardwick.  Both buildings are visible from the Derbyshire stretch of the M1 motorway, between junctions 28 and 29.