The Woodlands

THE WOODLANDS

Farmhouse dating from the 16th century, with early and mid-17th-century additions. Timber-framed construction with painted roughcast render and plain tile roof. The building is L-shaped, comprising two storeys with attics.

The main north-south range features an internal stack and lobby entrance. The chimney has four short attached hexagonal shafts on a moulded base. Each floor has two old three-light casement windows with transoms, pintle hinges and square leaded panes. The jettied south gable end has a similar window to the upper floor positioned below a boxed-in projecting tie-beam, with an Edwardian canted bay to the ground floor featuring marginal glazing to French doors. A two-storey porch with lead-covered flat roof contains a two-light square-leaded-paned window to the upper floor and an added open gabled porch extension. The entrance door is four-panelled with sunk panels, the top two glazed.

The rear wall contains one early 17th-century ground floor window with mullion-and-transome design, the mullions chamfered externally but ovolo-moulded inside, with diamond leading. A small single-light upper window has similar treatment. The east-west range displays two four-light windows, one three-light window and two cross windows, all with square leaded panes matching those in the other range.

A red brick gable end with chimney-stack sits on the east elevation, featuring corbels at the eaves, plain coping and shaft. A doorway with moulded jambs, bolection mould to the architrave and triangular pediment contains a half-glazed door. The rear wall has a large red-brick stepped stack set externally, and a 19th-century brick and flint single-storey lean-to.

The interior reveals four building phases. The earliest phase is a two-bay section in the north-west corner, originally an unheated parlour wing, now subdivided. It displays good close-studding, a cambered tie-beam with long arched braces, and a roof with clasped purlins and no principals. An original apex window has been altered to a doorway.

Added to this section is a two-cell lobby-entrance range in five bays aligned north-south, possibly replacing an older part of the complex. The interior shows good exposed studding on the upper floor, with chamfered and curved stops to ground-floor ceiling-beams. The upper floor contains blocked windows and a 18th-century fireplace surround with eared architrave. The roof features clasped purlins fitted into cut-away sections of full principal rafters, with very small windbraces.

The east-west range comprises two phases, both with plain timbering and exposed main ceiling-beams. The earlier part, on the right, occupies three bays and contains a large kitchen with two adjoining service rooms. The gable end wall to this section, displaying Jacobean carving to the overhanging tie-beam, now forms an inner wall at the left end of the range; it was originally not accessible from inside the house. The roof over the entire east-west range has two rows of butt purlins and very large principal rafters.

The building reached its present form by 1662 or earlier and is very well documented. A probate inventory for John Salkeld, who died in 1699 and lived there for many years, details the rooms recognisably as they survive today.