Former Saddle House At North Side Of Entrance To Toft House Farmhouse

The former saddle house, located at the north side of the entrance to Toft House farmhouse, is likely a late 18th-century structure built for the London Lead Company. It is constructed from roughly-coursed and squared sandstone with ashlar dressings and features a stone-flagged roof.

This one-storey building has one wide bay. There is a flat stone lintel above the door on the left, and a similar lintel with a rough slab sill above a square opening to the right of the door. The low-pitched roof includes a stone chimney with drip strings at both the base and near the top. The rear wall facing the road is blank.

Inside, the building has a massive flat stone fire lintel in the right return wall, supported by a stone corbel on the left and set into the wall on the right. There are two square lamp recesses on the rear wall and one on the left wall. The roof is made of roughly-shaped single purlins and ridge, with similar rafters, although the ridge piece was broken at the time of the survey.

This building was originally used as a storage room for pack-horse saddles, which were employed to transport lead ore to a nearby smelt mill. The construction of a bridge and road in the 19th century likely rendered the building obsolete.