Parsonage Farmhouse

Parsonage Farmhouse is a lobby-entrance house dating from the early 17th century, with extensions added in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is timber-framed and plastered, with a roof partially covered in handmade red clay tiles and partially in machine-made red clay tiles. The building has four bays arranged along a north-east to south-west axis. The original chimney stack is located in the second bay from the south-west, and a kitchen/bakehouse is situated at the rear of the north-east end, featuring an internal chimney stack at the north-west gable. Lean-to porches are attached to the east, in the angle between the main block and the extension, and to the west in the other angle. The building is two storeys high. The south-east (front) elevation is pargetted with combed designs and concentric circles in panels, and contains a front door and three casement windows, with four windows on the first floor, all of which are 20th-century additions. The roof is half-hipped at both ends and displays a date of 1595 in 20th-century pargetting at the north-east end. Interior features include jowled wallposts, straight tiebeams, primary straight bracing, heavy studding with much re-used timber, and a clasped purlin roof. Stop-chamfered axial beams are visible over the south-west and middle lower rooms. The common joists are chamfered and stopped over the south-west lower room, unchamfered over the middle lower room, and all are of vertical section. Over the north-east lower room, the joists are arranged longitudinally, unchamfered, and of horizontal section, lodged at both ends, with an original stair trap in the north-east corner. The Walker map of 1609 shows two single-storey houses on this site. The current house was built in two storeys from the outset, likely incorporating re-used timber from the earlier buildings. The arrangement of floor joists is notable, indicating that even after 1609 plain joists of horizontal section were acceptable in a parsonage house at the service end, whereas elsewhere vertical section joists were used, likely lathed and plastered to the soffits in the ‘hall’ and exposed and stop-chamfered in the parlour. The roof’s mixture of old handmade and 20th-century machine-made tiles on both pitches is considered historically inappropriate; the lower half of the south-east pitch uses old tiles, the upper half new tiles, and on the north-west pitch, the north-eastern third uses old tiles, with the remainder being new. Old tiles are also present on the kitchen/bakehouse extension. Re-arrangement of the tiles, and preferably replacement with entirely handmade red clay tiles, is recommended.