No 14 (The Porch House), With Cottage And Garage Range To East

No. 14, known as The Porch House, is a house dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries, built on an earlier core. It is constructed of timber framing and rubble stone, with stone slate roofs. The building has two storeys and an attic, with a smaller cottage adjoining to the east, which is one and a half storeys high.

The main front features two close-studded gables above a rubble stone ground floor. The ground floor has four 20th-century eighteen-pane sash windows, while the first floor has triple casement windows on each side. A larger gable on the left side has an attic casement pair and a side stack. A rubble stone side wall on the right includes a large, partly corbelled external stack from the 16th century. To the left of the main range is a lower range, possibly originating from the 14th century, featuring a projecting two-storey porch. This porch is gabled, timber-framed with heavy arched timbers to the entry and inner doorway, a jettied upper floor, and a four-light timber mullion window with cusped lights, and appears to be from the 15th century. A range to the east was largely rebuilt in the early 20th century by H. Brakspear as a service wing, but a throughway between the garages and domestic section reveals a full cruck truss within, similar to those elsewhere along this side of High Street. Behind the main range is a parallel rear wing, likely 17th century but raised in the 18th, with a two-storey design and a three-window south front, incorporating a west stack. Thick glazing bar sashes are found in the ground floor southwest room, with sashes and casements elsewhere.

Inside, the passage behind the porch has a heavy chamfered beam on the east side. The left room in the main range has a moulded Tudor-arched stone fireplace and shelf, likely dating to the 16th century. A cross wing, possibly of 15th-century origin and unaltered when the left side was reconstructed, has a heavy beamed compartmental ceiling to the ground floor, 17th-century panelling, and a plain Tudor-arched fireplace. The room above the cross wing has a 1½ bay wind-braced roof with a tie-beam-and-collar truss, carried at its inner end on a massive jowelled post. On the left side of this upper room is a heavy beamed first floor ceiling. The attic has an unusual truss featuring a king-post and horizontal pieces curved at the springing from the principal rafters, mirroring those found in Lacock Abbey’s service court and the barn, now the Fox-Talbot Museum. The rear range contains a late 17th-century open well staircase, featuring turned balusters, square newels with caps and pendants, and dado panelling. The ground floor southwest room has 18th-century fielded panelled window seats and some reset 16th-century encaustic tiles from Lacock Abbey in the fireplace. A four-bay single purlin roof is present. Plans from around 1910 by H. Brakspear, commissioned by C.H. Talbot of Lacock Abbey, show that the timber-framing had been plastered over before restoration.