The Vicarage

The Vicarage is a timber-framed building of lobby entrance form, dating from approximately 1600, with later additions and extensions from the 18th and 19th centuries. It is constructed with roughcast rendering over a timber frame, and has a roof of handmade red clay tiles. The building comprises four bays oriented approximately northeast to southwest, with a southeast aspect, and features an axial chimney stack in the second bay from the southwest, creating a lobby entrance. A service wing is attached to the northeast side of the northeast bay, likely built at the same time as the main structure. A stair tower stands to the northwest of the chimney stack, with a gabled extension from the 18th century situated between the tower and the service wing. External chimney stacks are located at the northwest and northeast corners. A 20th-century, two-storey flat-roofed extension is present at the northeast end, and a late 19th-century crosswing extends from the southwest end, meeting the stair tower to the northeast.

The building has two storeys and includes a 19th-century Gothick door under a shallow hood with mixed Gothick and classical ornament. Four casement windows, also dating from the 19th century, are present, three featuring Gothick tracery. Above, four similar windows are set into the first floor, all with Gothick tracery. A hipped roof is topped with a wooden parapet. The late 19th-century crosswing has one tripartite sash window on each floor and a band of polychrome brickwork following the curve of the ground floor window’s arch. Grouped diagonal shafts are visible on the axial and northeast stacks.

The interior is fully plastered, with original beams boxed in. An 18th-century staircase has a pine rail and three slender turned balusters to each tread, although some are missing or damaged. Early 19th-century cast iron grates are located in two upper rooms on either side of the axial stack. Inspection of the southeast wallplate reveals halved and bridled scarf joints. The roof has a clasped purlin construction, with curved wind bracing; it was originally hipped at the southwest end, later altered to a hip at the northeast end. Original “wattle and daub” partitions remain visible within the roof.

A 1610 terrier (estate survey) describes the vicarage as having a hall, a parlour, and an entry floor with boards, a kitchen, four small rooms, four chambers, a study, and two staircases. The will of Nehemiah Holmes, vicar from 1662 to 1685, details numerous domestic items within ‘the Chamber over the Parlour,’ ‘the hall chamber,’ ‘the chamber over the dairy,’ and ‘the old study,’ which are identifiable as the upper southwest room, the adjacent northeast room, and the upper room of the northwest service wing, respectively. A 1771 account states that the vicarage had been “almost entirely new-built,” but this appears to refer to superficial alterations rather than structural changes. A photograph from 1861, held by the current vicar, depicts the building from the west before the addition of the Victorian crosswing.