Moor Hall – three MICHELIN Stars beside a Tudor moat in Lancashire

Moor Hall sits behind a line of mature trees on Prescot Road in Aughton, a quiet West Lancashire village close to the old market town of Ormskirk. The Grade II* listed gentry house stands in five acres of grounds that run down to a lake said to be the surviving remnant of a medieval moat, and inside it now houses one of only ten restaurants in Britain with three MICHELIN Stars. Chef Mark Birchall bought the then-derelict hall with business partners Andy and Tracey Bell in 2015 and spent two years rebuilding it before opening in March 2017. Recognition came quickly: a first star within six months, a second the following year, and in February 2025 a third, making Birchall the first Roux Scholar ever to take a restaurant of his own to three-star status. The MICHELIN Guide has also given the house itself Two MICHELIN Keys, confirmed again for 2026. Behind the kitchen lie a working garden, a cheese room and fourteen bedrooms built for lingering rather than passing through.

01The house

Moor Hall is a Grade II* listed gentry house of sixteenth-century origin in Aughton, near Ormskirk in West Lancashire, its gabled front and mullioned windows still legible beneath later alterations. For most of the twentieth century it passed between local families before falling into disrepair, until Andy and Tracey Bell acquired the property in 2015 with a plan to regenerate the estate and build a world-class restaurant in partnership with Mark Birchall.

The two-year renovation that followed was built on reuse rather than replacement: sandstone salvaged from the building was turned into crockery by local ceramic artist Sarah Jerath, who hand-finishes each piece so that no two are alike. The result sits the glass-walled dining room against original stonework, old beams and new oak, a deliberate conversation between a Tudor-era manor and a contemporary kitchen.

02Rooms and suites

There are fourteen bedrooms in total: five in the historic Main House, two in Moor Hall's original Gatehouse, and seven newer Garden rooms scattered through the grounds among birds, plants and trees. Each is named after a plant or hedgerow fruit grown on site – Mulberry, Oxalis, Borage, Sea Buckthorn, Bramble – and each is designed and finished individually rather than to a repeated template.

Insider tip

Book dining well ahead; The Barn next door offers a more relaxed, one-star alternative with Sunday lunch.

Several rooms play directly on the setting: Bilberry, in the Main House, has an emperor bed, a Victorian fireplace and a bay window seat looking straight over the lake, while Medlar, in the Gatehouse, pairs an emperor bed with an evening lounge and a forty-inch television.

03Where to eat

Mark Birchall was born in Chorley and trained at Runshaw College before working his way through some of the country's most serious kitchens: The Walnut Tree in Abergavenny under Shaun Hill, then five years at Northcote under Nigel Howarth, then almost a decade at L'Enclume in Cumbria, where he rose from sous-chef in 2006 to head chef in 2008. In 2011 he won the Roux Scholarship and staged at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, before becoming group executive chef for Umbel Restaurant Group in 2014 and finally, in 2015, leaving to build Moor Hall with the Bells.

The restaurant holds a Michelin Green Star alongside its three stars and five AA Rosettes, its menus built around what grows in the five-acre garden and what can be sourced from Lancashire farmers and artisans. The third star arrived in February 2025, at a MICHELIN ceremony in Glasgow, one of the headline additions to a Great Britain and Ireland guide that named twenty-two new stars that year.

A short walk from the main house, The Barn opened in autumn 2017 as the informal counterpart to Moor Hall, an airy, beamed dining room for around sixty-five guests with its own integral bar and views back across the lake to the Hall. It earned its own Michelin star in 2022 and three AA Rosettes, and is best known locally for a Sunday lunch built around slow-roasted, long-aged Lake District beef.

04The cellar

Downstairs, an impressive cheese room and a wine cellar built to hold several hundred bins underpin a list serious enough to win Best Wine List in England, and overall, at the 2024 AA Hospitality Awards – recognition for restaurant director Matthew Davison's work building and maintaining it. Upstairs in the grounds, the kitchen keeps its own charcuterie, bread-making and a small micro-dairy running, so that much of what reaches the table, from cured meats to cheese, never leaves the five acres it was grown on.

05The neighbourhood

Aughton is a small, leafy village rather than a destination in its own right, which is part of the point: Moor Hall sits strategically between Manchester and the Lake District, close enough to Liverpool for a focused day trip and quiet enough that the five acres of gardens – filled with beetroot, turnips and step-over apple trees – feel genuinely rural. Ormskirk, the ancient market town a few minutes away, gives the area its sense of scale and history.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.