The Man Who Tried to Steal the Crown Jewels Also Tried to Steal This House in Culcheth
Holcroft Lane looks like an ordinary road on the edge of Culcheth. Five hundred years ago, a house on it was fought over by the man who later tried to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.
A manor split in the 1200s.
Holcroft Hall traces back to the mid-13th century, when the old Culcheth Manor was divided up. The Holcroft family, likely descended from the original de Culcheth family, held the estate for generations, producing a Tudor-era politician, John Holcroft, and a courtier, Sir Thomas Holcroft, both sons of the John Holcroft who first put the family's name on record here in the early 1500s.
The house that still stands.
The current building is a late 15th or early 16th century farmhouse, extended in the 18th century, and it's Grade II* listed, one level below the very highest protection a building in England can get. It has mullion windows, a huge chimney stack, and, more unusually, a priest hole built into that chimney, a hidden space used to conceal Catholic priests during a period when practising that faith openly could get you killed.
Then Colonel Blood got involved.
By the English Civil War, the estate belonged to Colonel John Holcroft, who fought for Parliament. His daughter, Mary, married a man named Thomas Blood, and in the 1670s, Blood tried to use that marriage to seize the estate for himself. This is the same Thomas Blood who, in 1671, disguised himself as a clergyman and came within a hair's breadth of walking out of the Tower of London with the Crown Jewels themselves, one of the most audacious robbery attempts in English history. He failed to take the crown, and it looks like he failed to take the house too, it stayed with the Holcrofts before eventually passing to the Tyldesley family.
What's actually there today.
Holcroft Hall still stands on Holcroft Lane as a private residence, still called Holcroft Hall. A newer residential street nearby has since taken the same name, a small, easy-to-miss nod to five hundred years of history sitting on the same patch of land. Across Culcheth more broadly, the average sold price currently sits at £461,059, with detached homes averaging £646,198, so the area the Holcrofts once held has become some of the most sought-after ground in the borough for entirely different reasons now.
None of this shows up when you're scrolling a listing. It's just quietly sitting underneath a road most people drive down without a second thought.
Sources: Historic England listing 1159651 (Holcroft Hall, Grade II); Wikipedia, "Holcroft Hall"; Rightmove sold price data for Culcheth, September 2026.*
