When his sister, Eleanor, Lady Leighton Warren inherited the estate, she did not continue this custom. By the sounds of it she was a bit of an introvert. Either that or she was just sick of random people wandering onto her family estate like they owned the place. Wishing for more privacy, she closed the park to public access, and greatly reduced the number of visitors to the old hall. Without regular use, this marked the beginning of the end, and after Lady Leighton Warren's death, her son Cuthbert closed the old hall at the outbreak of the First World War. Death duties were now breaking apart estates country-wide, and to make matters worse by this time the area around the hall had started to suffer from subsidence. By 1924 a buttress had been built to support one of the walls. Essentially the place would never be able stand up on its own foundations again.