Steepleton Manor With Attached Courtyard Walls And Gates

WINTERBOURNE STEEPLETON SY 68 NW STEEPLETON VILLAGE

8/160 Steepleton Manor with attached courtyard walls and gates.

GV II

Manor House, now Retirement Home. 1870. By T H Wyatt for W G Lambert. Rock-faced Portland stone walls, with Ham Stone dressings, for windows, doors, strings, buttresses and finials. Clay tile and slate roofs. Grouped Portland and Ham stone stacks on ridges left and right of centre, and in valleys. H-plan house, with low single-storey service ranges off the west end. 2 storeys and attics. 7 bays to front (north) elevation, slightly asymmetrical. Windows of 2 and 3 lights have ovolo-moulded mullions and straight-chamfered jambs, cross-transomed to ground floor. Wooden sashes, mainly with plate glass, though coloured quarries in rectangular leading immediately right of front door. Gabled dormers with 2-light mullions and stone finials over. 2 storey porch at centre with buttresses and barley-sugar finials. 2-light transomed mullion window to first floor. Entrance has a pointed arch in a square head, with deep moulded jambs and a label over. Foliage. 2-leaf door with pointed head and 4 recess-panels each, C19. Shield of Arms over. Further stone shields in top left and top right gables. East elevation has 2 large canted bays to ground floor with French window between. Inscription on parapets of bays (left): W G L HOC ERAT IN VOTIS 1870; (right) SERVATA FIDES CINERI, and 2 shields of arms. South elevation, more asymmetrical, with large canted bay at left ground, large staircase window mullioned and double-transomed at centre, and canted oriel at right first floor level carried on a buttress and heavily moulded corbelling, single sashes to each side with a high transom. Single-storey range of service-rooms with same masonry and pitched slate roofs. Small single and double sashes, 3 plank doors, widely spaced on south side, C19.

Interior: large hall left from porch, with 2 round arches (Tuscan column) giving access to stair well. Original doors and window shutters throughout. Top landing with elliptical arches carried on scroll corbels. Plaster palmette and other foliage cornices to ground floor rooms. Attached front courtyard walls forming a rectangle-to roadside, rock-faced with chamfered stone coping, square stone piers with ball finials on east and west sides; front wall is low with continuous stone arcading over, Gibbsian stone piers with moulded cornices and gadrooned cases on top, original iron gates. (J Newman and N Pevsner, Dorset, p.491)

Listing NGR: SY6283889748