Newstead Priory Farmhouse And Screen Wall Adjoining To Left

Farmhouse and adjoining screen wall, incorporating the former monastic range of Gilbertine Priory and reusing medieval masonry. The building comprises a 12th and 13th-century undercroft with a 15th and 16th-century first-floor section, extended and converted to a house in the early 19th century for the Yarborough Estate. Later 19th-century bay windows and extensions were added to the right and rear.

The main range is built in squared limestone and rubble with ashlar dressings, rendered to the front and part of the left return. The rear extension uses coursed limestone rubble with brick dressings, the right extension is rendered, and brick stacks rise from the building. The main range has a Westmorland slate roof, while the bay windows and later extensions have Welsh slate roofs.

The plan comprises a two-room central-entrance hall on the east front. The ground floor includes a vaulted undercroft of 2 by 2 bays forming the left room, with the former entrance hall now opened out as the right room and stairs to the rear. A double-depth kitchen and lobby extension extends to the right, with a single-room extension to the rear.

The east front is two storeys with four first-floor windows. A single-window extension set back to the right is accompanied by a single-bay screen wall to the left. The ground floor has a chamfered plinth and a round-arched entrance to the right of centre with a recessed half-glazed panelled door and plain overlight, flanked by single canted bay windows on each side with sills, plate-glass sashes and moulded cornices. A 20th-century casement serves the right extension. The first-floor features round-headed sashes in flush wooden architraves with glazing bars and sills. A moulded wooden eaves board tops the front, with stone-coped gables and shaped kneelers. A central axial stack and an end stack to the right both have dentilled cornices. The double-span roof to the extension has coped gables, shaped kneelers and corniced end stacks.

The screen wall continues the front line of the building, with a plinth, round-headed coved niche, ashlar coping ramped down to the left between piers, and ashlar ball finials.

The rear of the main range has ashlar quoins; the wing has brick quoins. The main range has steps down to a half-glazed two-fold door beneath a timber lintel, and a 16th-century three-light first-floor window in painted ashlar with four-centred arch lights, moulded mullions and 19th-century glazing bars, beneath a hood-mould with carved bust stops. A 16-pane sash in the wing sits within a flush wooden architrave and brick surround with a segmental arch containing a reset medieval carved stone head. The right return of the main range has a central ground-floor round-headed window with a 12-pane sliding sash flanked by a 12-pane sliding sash and a 20th-century casement, with a central first-floor 16-pane sash above.

The interior ground floor left features quadripartite vaulting with a plastered rubble ceiling and chamfered ashlar round-arched ribs with diamond stops, supported on moulded corbels and a central octagonal pier, perhaps a later replacement, with a moulded capital. A second plastered pier to the east, supporting an extension of the vaulting into the bay window, is probably a 19th-century insertion incorporating an original corbel. A former square-headed doorway in the south wall is now a window. Alterations revealed the remains of an arch in the north wall between the ground floor right and the kitchen. Nineteenth-century features include a wall cupboard to the ground floor left with geometrical glazing, elliptical-arched recesses to the ground floor right with archivolts and scrolled consoles, and a similar arch to the entrance passage.

Newstead-on-Ancholme Priory was founded before 1164 and dissolved in 1538. The surviving medieval structure is variously interpreted as a refectory or chapter house. A drawing by Nattes from 1795 shows a second three-light first-floor north window which may have been removed in the 19th century or blocked and obscured by the rear wing. An impressive adjoining 12th-century round-arched doorway was removed to Brocklesby Park soon after 1812, probably when the house was built, and subsequently lost.