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Duxbury Hall was demolished in 1956 after falling into disrepair. It features in the work of Bartlett, Huish, and Mackennel as it was believed to be the birthplace of Myles Standish. The hall was granted to the Standish family in the 1300s after the Druxbury family participated in the failed Banastre Rebellion. Extensively re-modelled after a fire in the nineteenth-century the house illustrated in Mayflower tourist literature bore little resemblance to the house that Myles Standish likely knew. Mackennel’s description contrasts the building with the surrounding industrial landscape of Lancashire:
“ […] In the middle distance were coal-pits, with their widespread rubbish- tips, tall chimneys, counting-houses, clanking chains, and clustered cottages where the workmen and their wives and children live. The feeling of space grew on one - space being slowly filled up, but not annihilated.
By-and-by we came to Duxbury, suddenly, unexpectedly, though I had been asking for it all along. The hall is a large square mansion, the outside walls about seventy years old; it has neither stateliness of proportion nor beauty of treatment. But the situation! the Standishes had the old English sense for sites in their building. The house lies in a little hollow, and faces the south; woods and fields are around you; the sun came out, warming the skin and lighting up the prospect. No sign of factory or coal-pit was visible from where I stood; if only the smoke would lift, I should see the land somewhat as Myles Standish saw it. It was an empty house, save for a few servants the garden was being prepared for its new occupants, and I was kindly allowed to walk about it. But this was no old garden; except for half a dozen splendid yews and the rich brown soil, nothing was here on which Myles Standish could have looked. These square mansions effectually destroy the feeling which years should bring; signs of decay suggest the need of the bricklayer and the plasterer and the mason; they move no reverence, stir no vague regret. It was a pleasant sight, but it had no sentiment in it.”