Furness Abbey Hotel

In the 17th century the whole site included the manor house for the Preston family, and probably incorporated the guest house of Furness Abbey. By the 19th century, having gone through several ownerships after the Preston family had departed, the manor house was empty and semi-derelict until it was purchased by the Furness Railway in 1847. The Lancaster architects Sharpe and Paley converted the ruined manor house into a hotel to accommodate visitors to the Abbey. This contained 36 bedrooms and "only three bathrooms". The hotel was extended as part of an integrated plan in the 1860s by E. G. Paley, to link it to the newly built Furness Abbey railway station.

The existing building, in two and three storeys, is constructed in red sandstone with slate roofs. Listing information and several architectural references conflate the origins of the Abbey Tavern and the wider site -viz: it "represents a fragment of a substantial hotel (sic) that served the Furness Railway"; With the hotel which had been built a little earlier, the building utilised stone detail salvaged from the Preston manor house, which likewise had been largely built from re-used stone taken from Furness Abbey after its dissolution. The incorporation of original medieval fragments within a mid-Victorian interpretation of medievalism has sometimes led to the mistaken inference that the…