Meath Home

This is a house, now used as a residential home. It was likely built around 1785 for N Godbold, and may incorporate earlier building fabric; it underwent significant alterations in the mid-19th century for Lord Brassey and further additions and alterations occurred in the 20th century. The exterior is stuccoed with a Welsh slate roof. The building is two and three storeys high.

The garden front has a plinth and a main range of one bay flanked by projecting bays on either side. The projecting bays have vermiculated quoins, a ground-floor canted bay window with a central French window, pilaster jambs with capitals, a frieze, a cornice, and a balustrade in front of the large first-floor window. A Diocletian window is set into the second floor within an architrave, sitting on sill blocks. The five central bays feature a central French window and otherwise have four-pane sash windows, which are shorter on the second floor with projecting sills. The building has an eaves cornice, a frieze with panels, a dentilled cornice, and a blocking course. There are three lateral stacks at the right end. To the left, set back, is a three-storey, five-bay addition with rusticated quoins on the left and sash windows. A single-storey, balustraded addition with a flat roof projects on the right; the roof is hipped on the left and has a stack on the left side.

The main entrance is on the right return, within a porch facing the garden front. The porch features a board door, a side column, an entablature with a cornice, and a blocking course. To the rear of the porch is a two-storey addition built of rubble, finished with brick dressings, and topped with a plain tile roof. The right return of the main range has three sash windows with different heights of glazing bars.

At the rear of the main range is an old door with six raised and fielded panels. Above it is an unequally-hung nine-pane sash window. The projecting block on the right has a tall round-arched stair window, a sash window with glazing bars on the first floor, and a sixteen-pane sash window on the second floor; other windows are four-pane or two-pane sashes.

The interior is largely from the 19th century, but the stair hall contains decorative plasterwork in an Adam style, with coving, acanthus-leaf cornices, and a mid-20th-century open-well staircase.

The building holds historical significance as the former home of General James Oglethorpe, the founder of the American colony of Georgia (established in 1732), until his death in 1785.