DO you fancy yourself as a lord or lady of the manor?

If you have around £800,000 to spare, you could be just that after a 150-year old mansion was put up for sale.

Hoddlesden Hall, built by William Ranken when the village was little more than a settlement, is now on the market.

It was the home of the Carus family, which owned mills in the village and in Darwen, and unlike many of the mill-owning family homes in the Darwen area, it has been maintained as a single residence.

The hall was sold by the Carus family in the 1980s and, in 1998, was bought by Tom Rennie, an IT consultant who has been a director of several high-profile concerns including Network Rail and Wolverhampton City Council.

He met graphic artist Gavin Rowe nine years ago and together the pair have made a number of renovations to the historic building.

Mr Rennie said: “I was living in Summerseat and I was in the pub when I was introduced to a builder called Geoff Hartley. He told me about the hall and the work he planned, so I came to have a look. I just fell in love with it.”

The historic building off Bayne Street was built in 1861 to replace the original Hoddlesden Hall, on the site of what is now the Ranken Arms pub, which was built at some point in the 16th or 17th century. William Bayne Ranken inherited the Hoddlesden estate in the 19th-century and, having discovered the land on which the hall now stands, decided to build a new house.

The original hall was demolished and rebuilt and was previously The Griffin pub.

William Ranken sold the hall to the Alexander Carus, a former Darwen mayor and Justice of the Peace, in 1895 and it remained in the Carus family for almost a century.

Since Mr Rennie bought the house from Geoff Hartley, he has spent thousands on rejuvenating the old building, with their pride and joy being the gardens.

With Mr Rennie being from Ayrshire and Mr Rowe from Essex, the pair have decided to cut their ties with Lancashire and move to Scotland.

Mr Rowe said: “It will be a big wrench as we love this house.”

Hoddlesden Hall is listed for sale at £799,950 with Proctors Estate Agents of Darwen.