Rays

Rays is a house on the High Street in Ingatestone, formerly known as Ray Farmhouse. It dates from the early 17th century and has been substantially altered and extended during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The building is timber-framed, plastered and weatherboarded, with a roof of handmade and machine-made red clay tiles. It has two storeys and an attic. The main range faces west with three bays and an axial stack in the middle bay, forming a lobby-entrance plan. A 17th- or 18th-century wing extends to the rear of the middle bay with an external stack at its end and a catslide extension to the left. An early 19th-century cross-wing extends to the left of the main range, projecting forward with an internal stack on its left side. Minor 20th-century single-storey extensions have been added to the rear and right of the rear wing.

The west elevation features a splayed bay with 20th-century casements on the ground floor and two early 19th-century casements. The first floor has a group of 8+8+8+8 lights, with the outer two in each group being casements and the inner lights fixed, plus two further casements, all dating to the early 19th century. An early 19th-century half-glazed door with Gothic tracery is set within a gabled porch. The left elevation is weatherboarded and has one early 19th-century casement on each floor. The rear gable of the cross-wing is also weatherboarded. The right elevation of the rear wing displays an early 19th-century sash of 4+8 lights on the ground floor. The rear elevation of the main range, to the left of the extensions, retains a reused 17th-century wrought-iron casement with 30 small rectangular panes of early glass with original leading, mounted on its side as a fixed light, with grouped diagonal shafts.

The interior contains unjowled posts, heavy studding, and primary straight bracing, with face-halved and bladed scarf jointing in the front wallplate. The right ground-floor room features an axial beam with early 18th-century ovolo-moulded plaster and an early 19th-century grey marble fireplace with moulded jambs and paterae, occupying a blocked larger hearth. The left ground-floor room has a chamfered axial beam that has been severed and jointed to an 18th-century transverse beam to form a stair, though the present staircase is later. It also contains a large wood-burning hearth with a rebuilt front jamb and relined interior. The right first-floor room contains an early 19th-century cast-iron grate with pilasters in low relief and curved splays. In the left first-floor room of the main range is a 17th-century three-plank door to a closet in front of the stack. The attic preserves the base of a diagonal shaft, concealed when the roof was raised. In the left side of the rear wing, above a door, is a 17th- or 18th-century borrowed light with 9+9+9 small leaded panes.

The roof has been raised approximately 0.90 metres in the 18th century, when the building originally comprised only one storey with attics above.

Ray's Farm was among lands in Fryerning granted by Lady Dorothea Wadham to endow Wadham College, Oxford, and is extensively documented in the college records to around 1920. Maps of 1741 and 1745 show it as a copyhold farm of 100 acres. The 1745 map provides an elevational view captioned "The West Front of Ray Farm House", depicting a central door, two ground-floor windows to the left and one to the right, three windows on the first floor, a diamond-shaped central stack, and a lean-to to the left in the position of the present cross-wing. Of the two windows to the left of the door, the left one is shown smaller than all the others and is now blocked, probably by the post introduced when the stair was built in its present position. The window above the door, serving a small closet, is also blocked.