A MULTI-million-pound scheme to transform a former stately home into a golf club house and 18-hole golf course will be discussed by Ribble Valley Council tonight.

The Woodfold estate, in Mellor, is the subject of a proposed development which includes rebuilding the derelict Woodfold Hall and building nine homes with garages in the "footprint" of the old farm building.

The council's planning and development committee will discuss the plans, but it is delegated to the chief executive for approval.

In 1988, councillors considered proposals to turn the 190 acres of land into a golf course and the old hall, hidden in woodland off Preston New Road, into a country club. The application was made by the estate, which was owned by Lord Alvingham. A year later the plans, which included the transformation of Stanley House into a restaurant and public house, were given the go-ahead.

But the latest application has been made by property developers Reilly Developments Ltd, which now owns the estate. Company records give the registered address of Reilly Developments as Chandlers Ford, Eastleigh, Hampshire, and one of three Irish directors of the firm as Mr Michael Reilly of Thorneyholme Hall, Dunsop Bridge.

The firm also has an office in Euxton near Chorley.

The hall, which has not been lived in for more than 50 years, was built by Henry Sudell, a prosperous merchant and Blackburn's largest employer of hand-loom weavers.

In 1796 he married and later that year he bought Woodfold estate and began to build the house. It was completed in 1799 from stone quarried at Abbott Brow in Mellor -- the same quarry that provided stone for Blackburn Cathedral.

In 1877 the hall was bought by Daniel Thwaites, founder of the brewery that still bears his name.

His daughter, Elma, inherited the hall and she stayed until the outbreak of World War Two. Woodfold was loaned as a haven for elderly women evacuees from Merseyside.

Elma Yerburgh's son, Lord Alvingham, took over the hall after her death, but, in the years after the war, it was too big to live in. In 1949, its treasures were sold off and the once-proud hall has slowly degenerated into a ruin and began to succumb to dry rot.