Skates Farmhouse

Skates Farmhouse is a house dating from around the 15th century, with parts rebuilt in the 17th and 18th centuries, and extended in the late 20th century. It features a timber-framed structure with Flemish bond red brick, vitrefied headers, and tile-hanging. The roofs are covered with clay plain tiles, featuring a half-hipped end and small gablets on the hipped cross-wing roof. There are brick axial and lateral side stacks.

The building has a two-storey Medieval cross-wing on the left and a hall on the right, which was rebuilt in the 17th century as a two-storey, one-room plan range with an axial stack and a straight staircase behind that forms an entrance lobby. There is a circa 19th-century outshut at the rear and a late 20th-century single-storey extension on the left side.

The exterior is two storeys high with an asymmetrical one-to-two bay southwest front. It has late 20th-century two-light casements, with the centre of the first floor blocked. The central doorway features a plank inner door and a small late 20th-century brick porch. The northwest side of the cross-wing displays exposed timber-framing with tension-braces above the late 20th-century single-storey extension. At the rear, there is a tile-hung projecting cross-wing on the right, with the main roof extending over the outshut in the angle.

Inside, the hall has a chamfered axial beam with cyma stops, supported at one end by a timber corbel, and a fireplace with a chamfered timber bressumer. The cross-wing features broad, closely spaced chamfered floor joists, and the chamber has exposed framing, large curved tension-braces, exposed tie-beams, and wall-plates. The wall on the hall side of the cross-wing has exposed posts and large curved braces that are encrusted with soot from the open hearth fire. The collar-rafter cross-wing roof retains intact common-rafter couples, all of which are smoke-blackened, while the hall roof has short wind-braces and intact common-rafter couples that are clean.