Bell Bridge House

Bell Bridge House is a house that dates from the 15th or early 16th century, with a central chimney and parlour extension added in the late 16th century. A floor was inserted in the 17th century, and an eastern chimney was added in the 18th century. The western service part was rebuilt in either the 18th or 19th century. The house features a timber frame on a low brick sill, roughcast with a weatherboarded apron, and has a steep old red tile roof.

It is a two-storey building with three cells and a central chimney, following a lobby-entry plan, and faces north. There is a 17th-century rear stair turret and a gabled front porch that has been renewed. The windows are irregularly placed, with four leaded flush casements on the first floor and three on the ground floor, along with two-light flush Yorkshire sliding casements at the rear. An external eastern gable chimney was added in the 18th century to heat the previously unheated parlour.

Inside, the parlour features exposed 17th-century chamfered and stopped narrow joists and an axial beam in the ceiling. The hall has a fine elaborately moulded timber 16th-century fireplace lintel for an open fire, an entrance to the stair, and very massive flat axial joists, a heavy cross-beam, and massive square posts. A stepped-jowled post and jetty corner bracket can be found in the enclosed space by the stair, along with remaining upper-floor walls, tension bracing, tie-beams, and a shutter groove for a window on the north side wall of the chamber above the hall. These features indicate that the late 16th-century chimney was built against a jettied external end-wall of an older building. What remains is the eastern bay of a two-storey wing, which consists of at least two bays, of a house whose hall and service end extended either in line to the west or at right angles to the south.