Fiddlers Croft 250 Metres Along Drive Beside Stonehouse Farm

TL 4422 LITTLE HADHAM STORTFORD ROAD (south side)

8/11 Fiddlers Croft 250 metres along drive 22.2.67 beside Stonehouse Farm

• II*

House. Early C17 brick house. N part has internal plaster decoration dateable to c.1603 (RCHM Typescript). Later S part probably built by John Sabine c,1644. (Minet (1914)). House of Nicholas Pamphillon, violin maker, c.1726 (HRO). Low plastered and pantiled modern N wing c.1922. One and a half storeys, of red brick in English bond with ovolo-moulded brick mullioned windows. Steep old red tile gable roofs. S front wall later faced in Flemish bond red brick with buttresses and projecting central gabled room over front door. This has modern panelled pargetting and a double frieze of violins above the door. Older N part lies E-W, with one room on each floor on each side of a large central chimney carried above the roof in 2 square shafts, 1 each side of the ridge. There is an external ledge at 1st floor level and 2-light brick mullioned windows. There are ogee- stopped and chamfered cross beams over the lower rooms. The added S part is parallel and overlaps two-thirds of the N part but has its floors considerably higher. Its central chimney has 3 octagonal shafts in line E-W, it has 3-light mullioned windows generally, axial stopped and chamfered beams, and no external ledge. An entrance and staircase occupy the NE angle in a wider extension of the N part and there is a tile-hung link at roof level. A round-arched opening gives onto the front door, a 3- light window lights the stair and a 2-light E gable window the landing. There are 3-centred arched fireplaces, chamfered and plastered, in the W 1st floor rooms in each part. The upper W room in the older N part has an almost complete scheme of decorative plasterwork on the upper parts of the walls probably commemorating the Union with Scotland c.1603. An elaborate fleur-de-lis, with choughs pecking berries above, and smaller fleur-de-lis, at cardinal points around. Palmette frieze on W wall. Central rose motif and fat thistles on the chimney. A lion rampant, with bezants top right and bottom left, in a border over the door. Similar large fleur-de-lis and lion rampant panels appear over staircases, and the lion panel on the S chimney on the upper landing, probably copied c.1922. Probably associated with the Capel family who had their seat at Hadham Hall up to c.1668.

Listing NGR: TL4446322412