Northgate Farmhouse

A farmhouse dating to the mid-16th century, with additions from the early and later 17th century, and a refronting and re-fenestration around 1800. The facade is of coursed yellow sandstone, while the rear and wings are red sandstone. The roofs are covered in pantiles and stone slate. Evidence of an earlier timber frame remains within the interior. The house is two storeys high and has four windows on the first floor. It comprises two cells of unequal size, divided by a stair/entrance hall, with rear wings. The front doorway has an overlight flanked by 24-pane Yorkshire sash windows, which have been skillfully converted into casements with monolithic lintels and projecting sills. A stone stack from the 17th century is visible on the left gable, heightened by 19th-century rendered brick; a right gable stack is of 19th-century rendered brick. The rear of the house features quoins on the wings, which are under a two-span roof. The right gable has an early 17th-century external stack with quoined angles, rebuilt above ground floor level around 1800. A west wing, added in the later 17th century, has a three-light window with a monolithic lintel on its left return, along with a window above with a smaller lintel to the left of a smaller window on each floor, at the junction with the external stack, which has shouldered offsets.

Inside, the first cell has a roughly-chamfered spine beam and transverse girding-beam with mortices for a studded wall of square panels at the junction with the stair-hall. A room in the west wing has a spine beam with a broad chamfer and ogee stops. On the first floor above the first cell, two posts with jowelled heads support large tie beams. The roof has five bays of a 16th-century collar-rafter roof, with the collars missing but halving joints visible on the rafters. The rafters have differing pitches, with a flatter pitch to the early 19th-century front and large tie beams with purlins supported by clasping angle struts. The west wing has a 17th-century three-bay roof with two principal rafter trusses, which lack tie beams but have high collars.

The house appears to have originally been a three-bay open timber-framed hall with a two-bay floored solar to the south end, with a later 17th-century rear wing added. It may have been a house of some status, centrally located in the village, originally set in a garden with 17th-century topiary box-hedges. The 16th-century roof’s construction is similar to that of Manor House Barn, Church Lane and is considered a rare and important survival.