Description: It is easy to forget just how small the built-up area of Dronfield was right into the nineteenth century. To the north of the River Drone lay open farmland, right up to Coal (Cold) Aston on its ridge top. Overlooking the mill dam that occupied the site of the town's present railway station two important houses were built on salubrious sites, taking advantage of dryad sunny slopes above the valley floor. The first of these we know today as Chiverton House, formerly Damflat House. It stands on the site of a dwelling that was probably timber framed, of H plan and erected in Tudor times. This, in turn, replaced what may have been a three-bay, single storey house with a thatched roof. The present house was built as the home of a successful lead merchant called Richard Hall about 1700 in a style by that time quite outdated. It has been called 'a transitional phase between the. . . Elizabethan with mullioned windows and the. . . symmetrical Renaissance'. Though it looks a large house it only contains three main rooms on the ground floor - kitchen, drawing room and dining room. It was probably the first house in the district to have en suite powder rooms (for powdering wigs in Georgian times), housed in a pair of towers at either end of the south front. It is a remarkable relic in being virtually unaltered since it was built and as such is a rare gem in this part of England. Once the property of the Dukes of Newcastle it later came into the hands of the Craven-Smith-Milnes of Winkburn, Nottinghamshire. Though it was occupied by the Rhodes family, local colliery owners, from about 1888 it was only in 1972 that Geoffrey Rhodes actually purchased the freehold. Soon afterwards a major rescue operation took place when the collapsed roof ridge beam (see roof line between the chimney stacks) was replaced, the roof re-slated and the brick extensions to the two main chimney stacks were removed. The new name for the house seems to have been given after a visit to Chiverton West Mine in Cornwall, to look at a beam engine there at a time when flooding problems were being experienced at Rhodes's Summerley coal mine. Chiverton House never had electricity, being lit by gas brackets and mantles. A large brass tap delivered cold water to a huge stone sink in the draughty kitchen. Chiverton House is a Grade II listed building. (information from Dronfield's remarkable house by Roger Redfern)