Church Cottage South Cottage

TM 37 NW COOKLEY COOKLEY CORNER

2/26 Church Cottage and South - Cottage.

GV II*

Formerly one house, now 2 cottages. C13 core with considerable later alterations. Timber framed and plastered, with colourwashed brick to the ground floor; slated roof. 2 storeys and attics. 2 windows, C19 casements to Church Cottage, large-paned mid C20 casements to South Cottage; mid C20 entrance doors. Central internal stack. Church Cottage contains one-and-a- half bays of the hall of a C13 aisled house, from which the aisles have been removed. The roof over the former nave, now the main roof of the house, has been raised, and the original rafters reused in a jumbled fashion. The end wall on the west has the remains of a pair of passing braces, halved against the tie-beam and the arcade posts, and an inner pair of straight braces, morticed into the sides of the arcade posts and the soffit of the tie beam, and springing from simply-moulded capitals. This truss, which does not seem likely to be the end wall of the original house, is infilled with later studding. The upper part of the octagonal arcade post can he seen above the stair: the capital is the most ornate so far discovered in Suffolk, with 4 much-damaged volutes and small trefoil leaf motifs between. In the open truss the passing-braces are doubled (cf. Brockley Hall), and the main tie beam was flanked by 2 outer, possibly smaller, ties. A C16 chimney-stack was inserted just to the east of the open truss. South Cottage contains a further small portion of the aisled hall, but the end wall of the hall, and possibly another bay associated with it, were cut off in the C17, and replaced by a short section of framing which made the rooms on each side of the stack of equal and turned the building into a 2-cell lobby entrance. It was subsequently turned into 2 cottages. It was used for many years as a vicarage, and seems likely to have connections with Sibton Abbey, which held the living prior to the Dissolution.

Listing NGR: TM3495375311