Description
The design of the Elizabethan mansion was a quadrangle of four bays in the local red sandstone, built around a central courtyard, and was symmetrical but not classical. The main entrance was a gateway flanked by octagonal towers with domed tops and bridged by a crenellated wall. The towers are prominent in an engraving of the ruins, after Peter de Wint, which dates from around 1818 and appears in George Ormerod's The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester. Brereton Hall, built some twenty years later by Sir John Savage's ward and son-in-law Sir William Brereton, was modelled on Rocksavage and copied its paired octagonal towers. Unlike Brereton Hall, the string courses of the Rocksavage towers extended around the adjoining walls.
The last major remnant of the house fell in around 1980. Only the orchard gateposts and fragments of garden and orchard walls now remain near the M56 Weaver Viaduct in Runcorn; they are listed at grade II.
The 18th-century Clifton Hall was originally a U-shaped brick building with prominent stone pilasters. One arm of the U has been demolished and the remnant is now surrounded by farm buildings.
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