16 And 16A, The College

The College comprises two houses, 16 and 16A, originally built as the Chamberlain's Checker, subsequently rebuilt as a prebendary house and now divided into two separate residences. The structure incorporates medieval fabric with alterations from the 17th and 18th centuries. It is constructed of sandstone rubble with an ashlar plinth and dressings, an early 18th-century ashlar arcade, a brick rear, and roofs of stone flags, Lakeland slate, and Welsh slate, featuring brick chimneys, some of which are rendered. The building has a main block flanked by two cross wings, with an arcaded ground floor.

No. 16A, on the left, has an entrance in its return gable, featuring horizontal sliding sash windows with broad glazing bars on the ground floor, and sash windows with glazing bars on the first floor, all with projecting stone sills and flat stone lintels. The central part of the building has a blocked arcade with round-headed windows and an impost string, set beneath a first-floor band. Above this are three large sash windows with glazing bars, with flat stone lintels. The right wing has internal steps leading to an 8-pane door within a stone architrave, surmounted by a coat-of-arms of Bishop Egerton (1771-87). A curved sash window with glazing bars is recessed obliquely above, set within an opening with a flat stone lintel and projecting stone sill, with a slit in the gable peak. A two-storey bow projects from the left return of the wing. The building has steeply pitched roofs and a stone-coped parapet on the right return of the left wing. A tall polygonal chimney is located on the left wing and on the rear of the central ridge.

Inside No. 16A, a wide Tudor-arched chimney exhibits stop-chamfered moulding, with accompanying spit machinery and a beam with a tongue-stopped chamfer. A rear kitchen doorway has a shouldered lintel, leading to a panelled room with shutters. The chimney piece features a panelled fascia and dentilled cornice. No. 16 contains an early 18th-century closed-string staircase with a flat handrail on skittle balusters, square newels with pendants, and a panelled dado. A central first-floor room is of a double cube shape, with a dado, end apse, corniced chimney piece with a fluted fascia, a stucco ceiling cornice, and a central acanthus roundel with an encircling enriched moulding. There are also panelled rooms and other 18th-century chimney pieces. The rear service passage on the ground floor has dado wainscoting. A first-floor room in the right cross wing contains a symmetrically-placed apse housing a bowed window that appears oblique from the exterior.