Sweetbriars

Sweetbriars is a house dating from the 15th century. It is timber-framed and rendered, featuring panels of comb-patterned pargetting, and has been restored with 20th-century black glazed pantiles. The building is 1½ storeys tall and has a three-cell plan. An internal chimney-stack has a plain shaft made of old red brick. The house includes three gabled dormers with fluted bargeboards and two-light square-leaded casement windows. On the ground floor, there is one four-light casement window with a transom and three cross windows, all with square leading, some of which have been restored in the 20th century. The entrance features an enclosed and gabled porch with a door that has six raised and fielded panels. There is also a small single-storey gabled extension at the right end.

The house is fundamentally medieval, with a central open hall flanked by two storied ends. In the 16th century, a chimney-stack with two back-to-back hearths was inserted at the lower end of the hall, blocking the cross-entry, and the two service rooms at the lower (north) end were combined into one. The inserted ceiling in the hall has a heavy chamfered main beam and joists, all featuring scroll stops. The lintel over the open fireplace has triple roll-moulding on the soffit and a complex central motif shaped like a cusped circle, adorned with formalized leaves and an ornate Tau cross. The original ceilings in the two end rooms have plain heavy unchamfered joists, with those at the upper (south) end being of better quality; there are remains of stair traps at both ends. The open truss over the hall has a cambered tie-beam and long arched braces that originally met in the center. Plain pilaster strips, now damaged, ran down the front of the main posts. The rafter roof is smoke-blackened, with remnants of original plaster in one end partition. The roofs over both ends have been reconstructed with side purlins, and the framing of the gable ends suggests that they were originally hipped. At the north end, there are remains of an oriel window on the upper floor.