Thorpe Hall has been a Grade 1 listed building since 1952. It was built in mid C17: the main block c1740; the wings late C18; extensive additions to west wing in the late C19. Two 3-light flat-headed windows with chamfered mullions in the basement indicate the presence of an earlier house on the site.
The Bosville family trace their ancestry to a Martin de Bosville who came from Normandy in the eleventh century. In 1773, Godfrey and Diana Bosville were gifted the house and estate of Thorpe Hall, and they made the Thorpe Estate their country home. Godfrey and Diana Bosville had two sons, William and Thomas, and two daughters, Elizabeth Diana and Julia. The Bosvilles gained a connection to the Irish barony of Sleat when Elizabeth Diana Bosville married Alexander Macdonald.
In 1910 Alexander Wentworth Macdonald Bosville finally won a court action and was declared 14th baronet and 21st chief of Sleat, and 6th Lord Macdonald of the Isles. He also assumed the surname Macdonald thus becoming the rather cumbersome Alexander Wentworth Macdonald Bosville-Macdonald. His great grandson, Sir Ian Godfrey Bosville-Macdonald, 17th baronet and 25th chief of Sleat (b.1947) is the current owner of Thorpe Hall.
The family and estate papers of the Bosville-Macdonald family are held in the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull, in four separate deposits. By far the largest, DDBM, came via the East Riding Record Office in 1974, and three small deposits followed on 3 September 1985, 18 February 1986 and 6 January 1987. The papers remain the property of Sir Ian Macdonald of Sleat. The Bosville-Macdonald family owned lands in the West Riding centred on Gunthwaite and in the East Riding centred on Thorpe, near Bridlington. The documents contain medieval charters, manorial records and title deeds, many of which have been printed in T Walter Hall, Land charters and court rolls from the Bosville collection (1930).
More information and photographs can be found by clicking here.