Wallalong House

Features include a splendid mix of Georgian and Victorian architecture, a pear-tree-lined driveway, 1830's sandstone stables with original cobblestone flooring, wide sweeping verandahs with wrought iron columns, an in-ground pool and massive two hundred year old fig trees with breathtaking elevated views of the surrounding farmland. Wallalong House is a rare piece of Hunter Valley colonial history, which survived remarkably intact in the same family for 172 years, right down to wide timber verandas, cedar skirtings in the rooms and a cluster of original bells used to summon servants. Wallalong House itself, dating from 1826, with a smaller 1913 addition, is more than impressive. It sits hidden on a hill, encircled by sprawling fig trees and overlooking the flood plains of Hinton and Morpeth - with grand views to Maitland, Largs and the mountains at Broke and beyond. Wallalong House has developed to become a most significant homestead in the Lower Hunter Valley. Built of locally made bricks, its L shaped plan with five verandas give it a graciousness which will never date. A single storey brick structure with stone quoins with two long wings at the rear forming a large grass courtyard, containing a cement covered well. The foundations are stone and the cellars are large, dry and airy. The majority of the rooms open onto verandas which makes the house cool in the summer. Iron pillars support the veranda roof and iron lace trims the cornice of the verandas. The cut stone for the facing of the homestead was all Balmain sandstone, which came up from Sydney as ship ballast in the heyday of river transport to Morpeth.