The Great Gatehouse

The Great Gatehouse is a late 15th-century gatehouse, incorporating a 12th-century archway originally built for the Augustinian abbey founded in 1140. It was restored and extended in the mid-19th century by J Pearson. Constructed from limestone ashlar with external stacks and a lead roof, the gatehouse is a single-depth structure.

It displays a combination of Norman and Perpendicular Gothic styles. The three-storey, three-window range features a finely carved semicircular-arched 12th-century gateway, decorated with twisted columns and beaded chevrons, topped with an architrave exhibiting Celtic-style interlacing. The south-facing side has three orders with cushion capitals. 19th-century buttresses support the structure, while a 15th-century inscribed cornice and rosettes are present in the spandrels. Above sits a two-storey canted oriel with four-light mullion and transom windows, with raised floral decorations in the panels below. Flanking the oriel are two-storey statue niches featuring canted canopies and statues of kings. A band of quatrefoil panels runs below a cornice, with blind panelling to the crenellated parapet surmounted by crocketed pinnacles at the angles.

To the right of the main gatehouse is a single-storey section with a smaller pedestrian archway, similar mouldings, but with the architrave inside the arch. A 15th-century first-floor mullion window features Tudor-arched heads. A 19th-century single-storey block to the left has an angle buttress and a two-centre doorway with a crocketed hood and ridged door.

Behind is a three-stage 15th-century tower with moulded strings and a matching panelled parapet, including an external stack with a panelled top. An octagonal stair turret rises to a panelled top and a crocketed ogee cap. The rear elevation is four storeys high, featuring three-light mullion windows.

Inside the main archway, two quadripartite vaulted bays are separated by a chevron-moulded arch. The sides contain arcades of pointed-arched niches formed from intersecting semicircular arches, with columns to cushion capitals and rope mouldings. Upstairs rooms feature Tudor-arched fireplaces and oriels with tracery panels in the soffits, alongside a stone winder stair. The 12th-century decoration of the arches and inner sides of the archway shares features with the nearby Chapter House, representing an early adoption of the pointed arch, and as noted by Gomme, “anticipated the impending Gothic.”