thumb|right|The Boulby sundial in the grounds
Walton Hall is a country house in Walton near Wakefield in West Yorkshire, England. It was built on the site of a former moated medieval hall in the Palladian style in 1767 on an island in a lake. It was the ancestral home of the naturalist and traveller Charles Waterton, who made Walton Hall into the world's first wildfowl and nature reserve.
Early history
Walton Hall, and a residence at Cawthorne, were home to the Anglo-Saxon chieftain Ailric, who is mentioned in the Domesday Book and was the King's Thane for South Yorkshire. When the Normans came to Yorkshire, Ailric was at Walton and was alerted by a man on horseback that they were coming in force. He amassed his retainers and on horseback they ambushed the mounted Norman knights of Ilbert de Laci, who were moving on the road from Tanshelf to Wakefield. The better armoured and armed knights of Ilbert de Laci resisted the attack. For two to three years Ailric maintained a guerrilla war out of his estates in the west of South Yorkshire, until de Laci was forced to come to an accommodation with him, whereby Ailric would communicate with the local people and de Laci would return many of his former estates, including Walton Hall.
A descendant of this family, Sara le Neville, married Thomas De Burgh, the Steward of the Countess of Brittany, Duchess of Richmond. Walton Hall was one of six manors, including the manors at Silkstone and Cawthorne and the De Burgh manors in North Yorkshire, that she lived at through the year. In 1333, Sir Philip de Burgh was granted a licence to crenellate his manor house at Walton.
The Waterton family acquired the Cawthorne estates and those at Walton including Walton Hall, with the marriage in 1435 of Constance Asshenhull, the heiress of the De Burgh family, to Richard Waterton.
thumb|276x276px|[[Charles Waterton by Charles Wilson Peale, 1824, National Gallery, London]]
World's first nature reserve
In 1805, Charles Waterton inherited the family estate at Walton Hall. He initially returned there in 1813 and settled more permanently in 1821 after returning from exploring and managing his uncle' slave plantations in British Guiana. Unusually for the time he was committed to nature conservation rather than hunting and game shooting for sport, which caused significant loss of native fauna. Between 1821 and 1826, he turned Waterton Park into a wildlife haven, designed to support and protect native and migratory species, especially birds.
He opened the park to the public for free to encourage people to enjoy nature. This included patients from mental asylums whose visits to spend time in nature formed part of their treatments. The parkland is now considered the first wildlife reserve, a landscape designed to protect wildlife. In the 1940s and again in the early 1950s and early 1960s the Hall was a maternity home.
Walton Hall is a proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site. Sir David Attenborough has stated that "Walton Hall is an extremely important site in the history of nature conservation worldwide. It is, arguably, the first tract of land anywhere in modern times to be protected, guarded and maintained as a nature reserve."
In 2024, Waterton Park, part of the estate, was registered at Grade II by Historic England, to ensure that the landscape considered "the world’s first nature reserve" is given greater protection and recognition. It is a multi-faceted sundial made out of a polyhedron. It indicates the time in the following cities around the world: Amsterdam, Basel, Boston, Demerara, Madras, Madrid, Mexico City, Moscow, Beijing, Philadelphia, Rome, and Warsaw.