The Everingham family settled at Stainborough c 1567 and sold the estate to Sir Gervase Cutler who built the Castle 1670-2.

The property was sold again in 1708 to Thomas Wentworth, a cousin of the Watson Wentworths of Wentworth Woodhouse. Wentworth Woodhouse was the family seat of the Straffords but when the 2nd Earl had died childless in 1695, the Earl had left his vast estates including Wentworth Woodhouse, to his younger nephew Thomas Watson who adopted the additional surname of Wentworth – and not to Thomas.

Furious that Wentworth Woodhouse was left to a distant relation, Thomas Wentworth plotted revenge. He bought Stainborough Castle, a few miles from Wentworth Woodhouse, renaming it Wentworth Castle. And in 1711, acquired the family title the Earldom of Strafford in order to outshine his ‘obnoxious relative’.

Wentworth extended the house by adding the east wing to designs by Johann Bodt. He built c1730 Stainborough Castle, north-west of the house, as a gothick mock castle probably on the site of an Iron Age fort. Wentworth also laid out the gardens which included a bowling green and two wildernesses in geometrical form – Thomas created the design to combine the crosses of St George and St Andrew, celebrating the union of Scotland and England in 1707.

Wentworth’s wealth came from coal mines and was also entwined with the slave trade. He was one of the principal negotiators of the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, which secured Britain as supplier of enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies in the New World. Proud of his achievement, he had a sundial created in the form of a kneeling African man – a legacy of the enslavement of Africans and the objectification of Black bodies in British and European art.

The Walled Gardens can be seen on early maps with an Orangery (c1728) on the east side of the garden. [The walls were partly rebuilt at the end of the 20th century when the gardens were used as a municipal nursery – the Walled Gardens are no longer open to the public.]

William, 2nd Earl Strafford inherited the estate in 1739 and updated the south front of the house. The Earl’s friend, Horace Walpole described Wentworth Castle as a perfect example of a house in a landscape setting: ‘If a model is sought of the most perfect taste in architecture, where grace softens dignity, and lightness attempers magnificence… where the position is the most happy, and even the colour of the stone the most harmonious; the virtuoso should be directed to the new front of Wentworth-castle: the result of the same judgement that had before distributed so many beauties over that domain and called from wood, water, hills, prospects, and buildings, a compendium of picturesque nature, improved by the chastity of art’. He continued: ‘my favourite of all great seats, such a variety of ground, of wood and water; almost all executed and disposed with so much taste’.

Although no payments to ‘Capability’ Brown for work at Wentworth have been discovered, it’s possible that Brown replaced the formal gardens with the fashionable more natural landscape style. Among the features which are typically Brownian are the serpentine lake (now partly dried up), the Palladian Bridge and the trees planted in clumps.

To the south-west of the house there is a stone obelisk called the Sun Monument. This was erected in 1747 by the 2nd Earl in memory of Lady Mary Wortley Montague. Lady Mary was an early adopter of inoculation against smallpox and helped bring the practice to England, influencing others to adopt it too. In the 18th century, it was highly unusual for a dedication to be made to someone not for their social position but for what they had achieved. The 2nd Earl and his siblings had been innoculated as children and perhaps he felt he owed his life to Lady Mary.

To the east of Menagerie Wood are the remains of a gothick folly – a menagerie? – to the designs of Richard Bentley with advice from Horace Walpole. [I didn’t find this on my visit although there are the remains of a building near the lake – a boathouse?]

On the edge of Ivas Wood, is the Rotunda built in 1746 and nearby the Duke Of Argyle’s Monument dedicated to his late father-in-law, the 2nd Duke of Argyll. The Duke had been against the government’s anti-Jacobite policies in Scotland.

The estate remained in the family until 1802 when the Strafford title became extinct and Wentworth Castle was inherited by the Vernon Wentworths. The glazed conservatory was built c1840 by FWT Vernon-Wentworth.

The family sold the house and gardens to Barnsley Council in 1948.

Further alterations were made in 20th century and the house is now used as an residential adult education centre and is seldom open to the public.