Red Lodge, including boundary fencing and adjacent former Norton Priory estate entrance gate piers and gates

Red Lodge

Red Lodge, a Grade II listed building, originally served as the north-eastern entrance lodge to the Norton Priory estate, with a sinuous drive once leading south-westerly towards Norton Hall. The approach drive to the lodge survives within a plantation to the east, but the drive to the main house and its accompanying parkland have been built over and lost.

The building is aligned north-south with an irregular cruciform plan and a main entrance on the eastern side, facing the former approach drive. An integral plinth runs around the base, with quoining at each corner. The ground and first floors are lit by metal-framed, mullioned windows of varying sizes. All ground-floor windows have ashlar dressings and ovolo-moulded mullions; all first-floor windows comprise 3-lights. Each elevation incorporates a gabled bay with a jettied gable supported by carved brackets. The upper floor on the north, south and west sides is also jettied out slightly and supported on carved timber corbels. The south, east and west gabled bays feature decorative framing. The gabled bays on the east and west sides are slightly lower in height and project from the main body as short cross wings, not directly aligned (creating the irregular cruciform plan). The eastern bay contains the staircase, lit at half-landing by a 3-light mullioned window matching the first-floor windows elsewhere.

Substantial buttressed wall stacks rise from the east and west elevations. The western stack bears a decorative carved panel with the initials of Sir Richard Brooke, 'RB', and the date '1870'. The main entrance on the east side consists of a 4-panel door beneath a corbelled, lean-to porch with a tiled roof. A larger, open-fronted lean-to porch with a tiled roof stands in front of the north gable end and serves as a secondary entrance; this is scheduled to be replaced by a modern single-storey extension and link passageway in the same style as the lodge.

Internally, the ground floor contains a single room with an altered fireplace opening and a small room to the west. A dog-leg stair with a winder at half-landing and a panelled balustrade rises from the east side, adjacent to a modern plank-and-batten door leading to an under-stair storage area at lower level, which is lit externally and may once have accessed a basement now blocked-up. The first floor comprises a narrow landing hallway with one room to the south and two rooms to the north. Some built-in cupboards survive, and some painted roof timbers are exposed as features. Floorboards (some covered by later materials) and screed floors are present throughout, with deep sills and reveals to windows. Most fireplaces have been removed except for a small painted fireplace in one first-floor room; original doors may survive beneath plyboard coverings.

Red Lodge is enclosed by wrought-iron estate fencing, extended eastwards probably in the early-to-mid 20th century to increase the plot size. Later gates in matching style are incorporated on the south side. The southern run of fencing includes a short off-shoot connecting to two sandstone gate piers with rounded heads and carved chevron decoration on each face. A wrought-iron vehicular or carriage gate and separate pedestrian gate with scrolled tops and ball finials span the space between the piers, originally forming one of the Norton Priory estate entrances and marking the line of the former estate driveway.