A recent BBC Countryfile programme declared that Renishaw Hall in north Derbyshire was the model for Lord and Lady Chatterley's home, Wragby Hall, in Lawrence's famous novel. How much evidence is there for this claim?
In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence describes Wragby as:
a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of the eighteenth century, and added onto, till it was a warren of a place ...
This could apply to Renishaw, although it is actually older than this. It has been the home of the Sitwell family for hundreds of years, and Lawrence had met them in Italy. Apparently the only time he went to Renishaw, in 1926, on a motor tour of Derbyshire with his sister Ada, the family were not at home.
So clearly Lawrence did not know the house well, but he may have been more interested in the setting, on the Derbyshire coalfield, since Clifford Chatterley is a mine owner, and at that time Renishaw was a mining district. There is also the evidence of a journey Lady Chatterley makes to Chesterfield, which fits with the Renishaw setting.
It seems possible that Lawrence took a vague impression of Renishaw as his inspiration for the story, but other elements, such as the gamekeeper's cottage,as discussed elsewhere on the blog, belong to his memories of the Moorgreen area.
