Lodge Farmhouse

Lodge Farmhouse is a house dating from around 1280 to 1330. It is timber framed and plastered, except for the south wall, which is covered with black weather-boards. The building has two storeys and four bays, with the front elevation having been re-styled around 1900. There is a central front door flanked by casement windows, and a range of three matching casements on the first storey. The roof is steeply pitched with hipped ends on the southern side and a gabled northern end.

At the rear (east wall), there are two red brick chimney stacks, and a single-storey extension projects from this wall, featuring a gabled and tiled roof. The original frame of the four-bay medieval house remains intact, with the end bays retaining their lodged floors supported by exceptionally large joists. The two central bays formed the open hall, which has tall diagonally mullioned side windows visible on the first floor. The storey-posts exhibit jowls of the earliest type, and the arch-braces spanning the hall are notably large with steeply pitched arcs.

The top-plates are prominently scarfed, featuring a stop-splayed and tabled joint with under-squinted butts and lateral wedges, a construction style known only to the period mentioned. The roof is entirely original, supported by two crown-posts that are boldly down-braced to their tie-beams, and a gabletted smoke vent survives at the north end. The side walls of the hall are distinctive, with cross-entry doorways framed into the side-girts and storey-posts, while the remaining bay of the hall is similarly 'arcaded' beneath the girt. The dimensions of the bays from south to north are approximately 15 feet for the service, 6 feet for the cross-entry, 9 feet for the hall, and 15 feet for the solar. This house is a remarkable survival in an urban area, remaining in an almost complete and unaltered state.