Watercolour painting above of the original Shrigley Hall, Cheshire.
The Downes family of Shrigley Hall, Macclesfield, held the estate for over 500 years until the early 19th century. The ancient estates of Shrigley and Worth were in the ancient parish of Prestbury, in the Diocese of Chester and the Downes of Shrigley and Worth was a branch of Downes of Sutton-Downes and Overton-in-Taxall.
The Shrigley Estate dates back to the de Shrigley and de Macclesfield families of around 1313, and was originally home to the Downes family, who held the estate from the early 14th century, when documents exist showing William, son of Robert de Downes, in occupation.
Other branches of the family existed at Butley and Tytherington in Cheshire, and at Wardley and Chorley in Lancashire. Worth Hall, near Macclesfield, originally the home of the Downes family of Worth, is now Davenport Golf Club. There is also documentary evidence of a branch of the Downes Family at Nantwich from 1596 to the early 19th century.
Though the family is now extinct, and the last of the male line of succession, Edward Downes having died on the 30th December 1819, before his death he had sold the family estates; that of Worth-in-Poynton was sold to Sir George Warren of Poynton, and that of Shrigley to Mr William Turner of Mill Hill, Blackburn in Lancashire. Turner had built St John’s & Gregory’s Church in Bollington in 1834, and the church still contains murals of the Downes family.
Edward Downes was survived by two sisters, Bridget Downes (spinster), and Sarah, wife of John Leach Panter of North End Lodge, Fulham in Middlesex.
Shrigley Hall reopened as a hotel in 1989 and was carefully restored to retain its original character.
[Source – http://www.geni.com/projects/Old-Historic-Families-of-Lancashire/15657]