The Courtyard is set within a former cobbled farmyard. The former farmhouse, Rake House, is a Georgian Grade 2 listed property that was built in 1807 and during 2007 year we are celebrating its 200th year birthday. Rake House was built for Elizabeth Lewis Haspell who was the widowed wife of Richard Haspell who died in 1802 and believed to have been as a result of the Napoleonic war. The first stables were built in 1826, by which time the kitchen extension had been built.

Elizabeth Haspell’s grandson, Thomas Lewis Haspell, is featured in an oil painting produced in the late 1850’s, possibly to establish his right of inheritance as he was born out of wedlock. Thomas’s son, John, took over the farm until the house was sold to Frederick Thornley in or around 1872. Frederick’s wife, Hannah, was the granddaughter of Samuel Burgess, Elizabeth Haspell’s brother and so the house remained connected to the original family until the 1960’s.

In the late 1870’s the house was extended to form a “Cheshire front to back house”. This was typical of some farm properties that were extended as the families became wealthier down the generations and, in this case, what was the front entrance became the rear entrance as a newer, more grand Victorian front entrance was built on the opposite side of the property. By the early 1960’s the property was divided into flats and during the 1970’s the property became derelict following a fire.

In 1980, the house and farm was bought by a local developer who separated the Victorian part of the house away from the Georgian part and converted the barns into separate properties. Roger and Jill Maher bought Rake House in 2003 as it had been empty for some time and subsequently set about carrying out further sympathetic restoration of the property to return it to it’s former glory and it has been their wish to have this completed in time for Rake House’s 200th birthday. Now with the launch of The Courtyard it provides new life to the former farm.

In January 2006, Rake House appeared in Cheshire Life as part of the feature on the village of Helsby. A watercolour of the house was painted by local Cheshire artist, Gordon Wilkinson. As a result of this feature a copy of the magazine was sent by somebody from Chester out to their cousin, Patsy Armour, in New Zealand who contacted Roger and Jill. Patsy is the great, great, great, great, granddaughter of Elizabeth Haspell and both she and her mother, Eleanor, who used to stay at Rake House during the 1930’s have provided Roger and Jill with a lot of the history to Rake House.