The Refectory the Vicarage

The property comprises a vicarage and a former priest’s house, now used for parish functions, dating to the early 19th century and around 1446 respectively. The vicarage is located to the left, and the priest’s house to the right.

The vicarage is built of limewashed render with a stone plinth and parapet; it has ashlar detailing to the porch and a hipped double Roman tile roof. The building is rectangular, two storeys high, and has three bays. All windows are 12-pane sashes. The west entrance front features a recessed central section and a Greek Doric distyle porch in antis, with fluted columns and a triglyph frieze. The porch has a two-leaf door with small panes of glass.

The refectory is of limewashed render with dressed stone to the buttresses and the south-east porch gable face, and has pantile roofs and coped stone gables. It is L-shaped, with a two-storey advanced porch. The main range’s windows are 2-light designs with cinquefoil-cusped heads under flat lintels with hoodmoulds and face stops. These are cross-mullioned on the ground floor, with single lights above. Offset buttresses are positioned between the windows. The porch gable end features a pointed-arched doorway with an inner order on shafts and capitals, a decorative order of filigree dogtooth ornament, and several further moulded orders with a hoodmould and angel stops holding heraldic shields. A further angel, all with missing heads, is located at the arch centre. Offset diagonal buttresses support a cross-mullion window to the parvise above the porch, and a winged angel is set within a square niche, holding a scroll. Inside the porch are benches, a moulded 4-panel compartmented ceiling, and a Tudor-arched doorway with a plank door. A stone stack sits at the east end, while the vicarage has two brick stacks on the left-hand side.

Inside the refectory, the ground floor room (hall) has a 6-panel compartmented ceiling and stone stairs built onto the north external wall, leading to a room above. The space now occupied by two rooms may have once been an open hall. The upper room’s stair doorway is Tudor-arched, and the roof above has three bays with two cambered arch braced collar trusses and three tiers of wind braces, all renewed. A similar structure with renewal is present over the parvise. The east end upper room features a coved compartmented ceiling and a carved stone fireplace with a moulded basket-handle arch and a decorative frieze of quatrefoils and mouchettes.

The eastern range, encompassing the refectory, was built by the executors of Bishop Beckington of Wells, and features heraldic devices of both Beckington and the Poulteney family on the porch.