Darnhall

Darnhall is a civil parish and small village to the south west of Winsford in the Borough of Cheshire West and Chester and the ceremonial county of Cheshire in England. It had a population of 232 at the 2011 Census.

==History== The Norman Earls of Chester had a hunting lodge or summer palace at Darnhall in Over parish. There was an enclosed area where deer and wild boar were kept to be hunted by the Earl and his guests. It was there that the last earl met his death in 1237. It was rumoured that his wife, Helen, the daughter of Llywelyn the Great, had poisoned him in order to favour the powerful aristocrat that her daughter had married. However, King Henry III annexed the title and its lands and spent time at Darnhall. After the Second Barons' War, the Ash Brook was dammed to drive three water mills and to make pools to keep fish. In 1270 at the behest of his son, Henry III gave the estate to the Cistercians, who built Darnhall Abbey in 1274 on the north bank of the new lake. However the land was not suitable for the grand scale of building envisaged, and the locals were not cooperative, so the monks left Darnhall to found Vale Royal Abbey in Whitegate in 1281.