Glebe Farmhouse Including Front Garden Walls

Glebe Farmhouse, including front garden walls

This is a farmhouse dating from the late 17th to early 18th century, substantially renovated in the mid to late 19th century. The building is constructed of plastered brick, though the north-west end exposes original brickwork built in Flemish bond with local handmade red brick and decorative use of burnt headers. The chimneys are brick stacks with plastered shafts. The roof is covered in red tile, though it was originally thatched.

The house is built on a terrace with the farmyard at a lower level at the north-west end. The main block faces south-west and follows a 3-room-and-through-passage plan. The passage separates the rooms, with the south-east end room containing a gable-end stack; this was probably originally the kitchen. The smaller unheated room adjacent to it was likely the buttery or dairy. The parlour occupies the left end and also has a gable-end stack. Access to the parlour from the passage is indirect, via a short corridor running along the rear of the passage. A doorway leads into the parlour from the front, while an arch through the rear wall opens to the original main stair housed in a turret projecting to the rear.

During the mid to late 19th century, significant alterations were made: a new kitchen block was constructed behind the parlour, the original parlour became a dining room, the original kitchen became a parlour, and a new main stair was built in a new stair block projecting to the rear of the new parlour. The house has two storeys and a cellar.

Externally, the front presents a regular though not symmetrical appearance. The windows are 20th-century insertions without glazing bars. The passage front doorway is positioned right of centre and contains a 19th-century 6-panel door sheltered by a 20th-century gabled porch. The roof is gable-ended. The north-west end displays the original brick and drops down toward the farmyard. At the lower level sits a cellar doorway with a plain plank door in a round-headed arch, flanked by unglazed windows of indeterminate date. Above this are single ground and first floor windows, both set under elliptical brick arches. The ground floor window contains an original oak window with chamfered mullions. The rear stair turret also retains an original oak window, distinguished by a flat-faced mullion and containing rectangular panes of leaded glass.

The interior retains sufficient original carpentry and joinery to indicate that 19th and 20th-century modernisations were largely superficial. The passage contains a short length of original fielded panelling in two heights. An original round-headed arch leads to the original open-well stair, which features a closed string, square newel posts, a moulded flat handrail and turned balusters. The former parlour is fitted with a moulded cornice, and other joinery details survive throughout the house. The former kitchen contains plain-chamfered crossbeams, though its fireplace is blocked. The roof structure was not inspected internally, but the bases of straight principals are visible, with scantling large enough to suggest they form part of the original A-frame trusses. The small cellar is covered by a brick segmental vault.

The front garden is enclosed by a stone rubble wall of various dates. The wall projects forward from the left end of the front where it revets the terrace, then returns across the front. This section incorporates a presumably 19th-century arch-headed doorway built of coursed blocks of local stone ashlar, with a projecting keystone and alternate voussoirs.