Church Cottage South Cottage

Church Cottage and South Cottage, originally one house and now two separate dwellings, have a core dating back to the 13th century, with substantial alterations in later periods. The construction is timber framed and plastered, with colourwashed brick on the ground floor and a slated roof. The building is two storeys high with attics, and contains two windows – 19th-century casements in Church Cottage and large-paned, mid-20th-century casements in South Cottage. Mid-20th-century entrance doors have been added. A central internal stack is present.

Church Cottage incorporates one-and-a-half bays of the hall from a 13th-century aisled house, where the aisles have been removed. The roof over what was originally the nave, now the main roof of the house, has been raised, and the original rafters have been reused in a seemingly random configuration. The west end wall retains remnants of a pair of passing braces, halved against the tie-beam and the arcade posts, along with an inner pair of straight braces morticed into the sides of the arcade posts and the soffit of the tie beam, springing from simply-moulded capitals. This truss, seemingly not the original end wall, is filled in with later studding. The upper part of an octagonal arcade post is visible above the stair. The capital is notable for being the most ornate so far discovered in Suffolk, exhibiting four much-damaged volutes and small trefoil leaf motifs. The open truss features doubled passing-braces, similar to Brockley Hall, and the main tie beam was originally flanked by two outer, possibly smaller, ties. A 16th-century chimney stack was inserted to the east of the open truss.

South Cottage contains a further small portion of the aisled hall; however, the end wall of the hall, and potentially another bay associated with it, was cut off in the 17th century, replaced by a short section of framing that created rooms on either side of the stack and changed the building into a two-cell lobby entrance. It was subsequently divided into two cottages. The cottages were used as a vicarage for many years and appear to have connections to Sibton Abbey, which held the living before the Dissolution.