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Dalemain's pink Georgian facade is, in the most literal sense, a mask. Behind it sits a much older house — medieval origins, a Tudor core — that the family who still live there deliberately chose to conceal rather than replace.
Sir Edward Hasell bought Dalemain in 1679. Before he owned it, he had served as steward to Lady Anne Clifford — one of the most significant figures in seventeenth-century Cumbrian history, a woman who fought a decades-long legal battle to inherit and restore her family's northern estates against determined opposition. Working closely with Clifford would have given Hasell an intimate understanding of exactly what it took to hold and manage a great northern estate, knowledge he put to direct use once Dalemain was his own.
Hasell's son completed the famous Georgian front in 1744, built specifically to enclose the older Elizabethan and medieval house within a new, symmetrical shell. It's a very deliberate piece of architectural theatre: rather than demolish what was there, the family wrapped it, creating a house that shows fashionable Georgian confidence to the outside world while keeping thirteenth-century remains — including an original peel tower — tucked inside.
The Hasell-McCosh family have now lived at Dalemain for eleven generations — a continuity that has produced some genuinely notable individual lives along the way. Elizabeth Julia Hasell, a Victorian writer and literary reviewer, lived at the house; Eva Hasell, born there in 1886, became a missionary to Canada and a significant figure in supporting the church in remote rural communities. Their stories sit alongside the house's grander architectural history as evidence of what a family home like this actually produces, generation after generation, beyond bricks and inheritance.
Dalemain’s family history can be woven into a bespoke heritage day near Ullswater.