Clock House

This is a former farmhouse dating from the mid to late 15th century, with significant alterations around 1600. It began as an open-hall house with a service cross-wing to the right; the original parlour cell was remodelled and extended into a cross-wing form around 1600. The house is timber-framed and plastered, with plaintiled roofs. The gables feature 19th-century bargeboards with spike finials. The windows are a mixture of late 18th or early 19th century small-pane sashes, early 20th century small-pane casements, and a chamber window from around 1600 with ovolo-mullions and diamond-leaded glazing. The front door is from the early 19th century, featuring six panels, a reeded architrave with paterae, and a simple cornice.

The roof has a substantial chimney built around 1600, with a square plinth constructed of random yellow and red bricks. It has four shafts: three are circular with moulded terracotta panels bearing roses or fleurs-de-lys, and one is octagonal (possibly rebuilt) in red brick. All the shafts have oversailing octagonal caps.

The two-bay open hall displays high-quality carpentry. An open truss has a cambered arch-braced tie beam with ogee-and-cavetto moulding, while the octagonal crownpost features a moulded capital and base and four-way knee-braces. The roof is fully exposed, and there is good close-studding. The cross-wing originally comprised three bays with twin service rooms. The chamber above (later subdivided) has open trusses with cross-quadrate crownposts, incorporating two-way bracing. The original parlour cell originally had a hipped or half-hipped roof.

The central chimney of around 1600 includes back-to-back fireplaces with arched plaster heads featuring ovolo moulding. Above the parlour is a chamber with a fine early 17th-century coved plaster ceiling, decorated with high-relief ribbed geometrical panels, friezes, central pendants, and other motifs, considered one of the richest examples of its type in Suffolk, although incomplete. There is also a good contemporary plastered overmantel in an adjacent room.

Other early 17th-century features include wainscotting in the cross-passage, a two-storey bay-window with ovolo-moulded mullions and a moulded gable tie-beam, and painted leaf designs in a first-floor corridor.