Kiplin Hall  Kiplin Hall is a Jacobean historic house at Kiplin in North Yorkshire, England, and a Grade I listed building. It stands by the River Swale in the Vale of Mowbray. Kiplin Hall is rich in education, in architecture and art, a museum of history, a gallery and provides a biographical record of its past English country house owners. The nearest villages are Scorton, Great Langton and Bolton-on-Swale. Like many great estates, the history of Kiplin was shaped by the C16th religious conflicts around the Reformation. The land was originally a monastic holding, under the ownership of Easby Abbey. Following the dissolution of the monasteries, the land at Kiplin passed to John Scrope, 8th Baron Scrope of Bolton and then to Thomas Wharton, 2nd Baron Wharton. Wharton, as a loyal servant of the Catholic Queen Mary, fell out of favour after her death, and sold the estate to the Calvert family in 1559. The house was built sometime during 1622–1625 for George Calvert, Secretary of State to James I, who later became first Lord Baltimore and founder of Maryland in what is now part of the United States. Initially built as a hunting lodge it was a slightly rectangular building fashioned of red brick with diamond patterning known as diapering formed from blue-black headers incorporated into the brick bond. Kiplin had four towers, which unusually, were not placed at the corners of the structure, but at the centre of each of the four walls – the north and south towers containing staircases, whilst the east and west comprised part of the rooms in which they were contained. At the summit of each tower is an ogee dome. In 1722, Charles Calvert found himself in financial difficulties and sold the Kiplin estate to his mother's second husband (his stepfather) Christopher Crowe for £7,000 (). Although not a member of the nobility, Crowe had been British Consul in Livorno, Italy and enjoyed the lucrative contract for supplying the British naval fleet with wine and olive oil. Combined with his activities in collecting antiquities for the British aristocracy his wealth and power grew. Purchasing Kiplin Hall around a century after its construction, he found the house to lack comfort (the Calverts had never lived there) and set about a renovation programme including the addition of a grand staircase, fireplaces and dado rails as well as a servants' wing to the north (much of which was demolished in the 1970s).