Cattle grid on road approaching Cardew Lodge

Cardew Lodge is a country house at Cardew near

Thursby Thursby is a village in the Allerdale borough of Cumbria, England. It is near to the city of Carlisle in North West England. Thursby was historically part of Cumberland. History Thursby lies on an old Roman road, 6 miles south of Carlisle ...

Cumbria Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in North West England, bordering Scotland. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local government, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. ...

. It is a Grade II

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern I ...

History

The house was built as a hunting lodge for Major-General William Henry Lowther following his retirement from the

Bengal Army The Bengal Army was the army of the Bengal Presidency, one of the three presidencies of British India within the British Empire. The presidency armies, like the presidencies themselves, belonged to the East India Company (EIC) until the Govern ...

in the late 1870s. The house has "single-storey gabled wings reminiscent of an Indian bungalow, which he stuffed with mementos of his time in Bengal, including the skin of a crocodile shot after it had eaten a man, and he planted rhododendrons and azaleas in his garden." The house was acquired by C. J. Ferguson, an architect, who designed and commissioned additions in 1889. In addition to the

turret Turret may refer to: * Turret (architecture), a small tower that projects above the wall of a building * Gun turret, a mechanism of a projectile-firing weapon * Objective turret, an indexable holder of multiple lenses in an optical microscope * ...

ed tower which is built into the house, it has twin towers on the drive up to the house. It became the retirement home of Barbara Dunn, the first British licensed

radio operator A radio operator (also, formerly, wireless operator in British and Commonwealth English) is a person who is responsible for the operations of a radio system. The profession of radio operator has become largely obsolete with the automation of ra ...

, after the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

and then became the home of the Mallinson family in 1980.

References

{{coord, 54.8326, N, 3.0335, W, region:GB-BKM_type:landmark, display=title Country houses in Cumbria Grade II listed houses Grade II listed buildings in Cumbria Dalston, Cumbria