St Frideswide'S Cottage

A seventeenth-century farmhouse, now a house, with probable seventeenth-century timber frame, largely re-clad in the eighteenth century. A right-hand wing is built of squared and coursed chalk on a sarsen base, with brick stacks. The left wing is constructed of random bond brick and chalk rubble brought to course. Both wings are covered by a tiled roof, with a thatched section to the right. The house is arranged in an L-shape. The garden front of the house has a right-hand wing with a one-window and one-door range, and a left-hand wing with a two-window and one-door range. Most windows are twentieth-century casements, except for an eighteenth-century three-light leaded window to the front right, which has an elliptical brick arch above it, and three-light eighteenth-century leaded windows to the rear of the right wing. A segmental brick arch covers a fixed leaded light to the right side of the left wing. The left wing also has tile-clad gabled dormers with twentieth-century casements. The house has nineteenth-century plank doors, including one twentieth-century door within the left wing. A gabled roof end stack is located on the right wing, and ridge and end stacks are on the left wing. Internally, the right wing features a chamfered beam with an elaborate stop on the ground floor, and a three-bay collar-truss with chamfered and stopped beams. The left wing’s three-bay trusses, with butt purlins, show traces of lap-dovetail joints, indicating the likely presence of a timber frame structure before the eighteenth-century brick and rubble cladding.