The Birches

The Birches is a large house, originally built around 1620 as a vicarage for Robert Barret. It was extended in the mid-18th century, and further altered in the mid-19th century and the 20th century. The house is primarily timber-framed, with much of the exterior rendered, with brick replacing timber at the rear. It has gabled roofs covered in plain old tiles, and two rear lateral stacks built of squared and coursed stone, finished with 19th-century brick.

The house has a cross-shaped layout, incorporating a central porch and a former kitchen in a basement to the right side, with a left-hand bay added in the mid-18th century. The front of the garden displays a four-window range, including a three-bay section from the early 17th century with a projecting, central gabled bay. The right-hand bay shows straight bracing to the exposed timber frame, with square first-floor framing and close studding to the ground floor, and two 17th-century four-light wood-mullioned and transomed windows. A jettied porch features square panelling on the first floor, with an ovolo-moulded jetty bressummer, and mid-19th-century Gothic-style windows. Rendered arches cover 20th-century windows and a door with a glazed porch on the left. A jettied right-end gable with an ovolo-moulded bressummer has a lunette above a mid-18th-century, two-story canted bay with 1989 glazing-bar sash windows set in Gothic-style architraves. A crenellated left gable wall, probably from the mid-18th century, also features a lunette above label moulds over 20th-century windows. A mid-19th-century stair-light with leaded lights is located at the rear. A 17th-century rear wing has brackets supporting a hipped hood over a mid-19th-century half-glazed Gothic-style door.

Inside, a large open fireplace is situated to the right of the cellar. Mid-18th-century panelled doors are set within moulded wood architraves. The original 17th-century house was divided into two large rooms by a timber-framed partition with an ovolo-moulded doorway to the rear; the room to the left has reset early 17th-century panelling with a heraldic cartouche on the overmantle, and a cased beam; the room to the right has chamfered beams. The rear wing contains a mid-18th-century open-well staircase with turned balusters, a ramped handrail, fret-cut brackets to the open string, and splat balusters from the ground floor to the cellar. A first-floor room to the right has a mid-18th-century fireplace with a bold cornice, and a chamfered beam with lambs-tongue stops repeated in the room to the left. The attic features trenched purlin trusses incorporating reused 15th-century principal rafters (with mortices for wind braces and tenoned butt purlins) and a collar with a carved boss from a 15th-century arch-braced roof. The mid-18th-century extension to the left has a mid-19th-century dog-leg staircase with turned balusters and reset 17th-century splat balusters to the attic.