Armitstead Hall is located about 2.7 km (1½ miles) west of the village of Giggleswick, on the boundary with Lawkland (in the historic parish of Clapham). The farmhouse and most of the farm buildings are on the Giggleswick side of the boundary, but part of the farm falls within Lawkland.
The Giggleswick parish registers indicate that members of the Armitstead family lived there until the 1620s. By 1626 James Foster was farming there.
A short item about the farm appeared in the November 1953 issue of The Dalesman magazine, as part of a series on Historic Farmhouses of the Dales:
The old farmhouse of Armitstead will be familiar to many people who travel by train from the West Riding towns to North Lancashire and the Lake District. It stands quite close to the railway line between Giggleswick and Clapham, an interesting bucolic essay in the Georgian style. Its proportions are good and the front of the house is thoughtfully designed but there are few graces of detail; all is plain, almost to brusqueness. It must have been built, one imagines, for a plain blunt man, but a man of substance.
At one time there was a small hamlet at Armitstead, but today apart from the farmhouse, the only evidence that there was a more extensive settlement here is to be found in a few old doorheads and mullioned windows to be seen here and there about the long ranges of farm buildings. Early in the middle ages the hamlet gave its name to a well-to-do yeoman family which had its home there. The name, as usual at the period, varies considerably in spelling, and one variation is 'Ermysted.' The William Ermysted who was Canon of St. Pauls, and Chaplain to Queen Mary, and who founded the grammar school at Skipton, was in all probability a member of the Giggleswick family. In the Poll Tax rolls of 1377 we find that Laurence de Armetstead pays more than anyone else in the township of Giggleswick.
After the dissolution of the monasteries the family bought monastic property and became increasingly prominent in local affairs, churchwardens and governors of the school. An Armitstead was headmaster of Giggleswick from 1685 to 1712. During the Napoleonic wars John Armitstead served as a captain in the Craven Legion. The family is a durable strand in the fabric of Craven history, and their old house will remain as a memorial for many years yet to come.