East Barton, Including Front Garden Walls And Gatepiers

East Barton, including front garden walls and gatepiers

East Barton is a substantial house combining late medieval and early 17th-century fabric with a main range rebuilt in the late 17th century. The structure is built of white painted brick in Flemish bond, with stone rubble to the east wing. The roofs are slate with gable ends; the east wing has Roman tiles to its rear and a 19th-century carved bargeboard at its front gable end. An axial brick stack rises from the main range, while the west wing has two lateral brick stacks with tall shafts, the rear one being particularly impressive with pronounced offsets.

The original plan is uncertain due to 17th-century rebuilding, but the main central range likely contained the medieval hall and lower end, with the east end forming a cross-wing at the higher end, possibly a parlour. This eastern section has been partially demolished behind and is now attached only at its right-hand corner. The main range was rebuilt in the late 17th century, retaining approximately its original plan, with a large room to the right (probably the hall position), a central stair hall in the passage position, and a large left-hand room serving as the kitchen with an end stack, now the massive lateral stack on the left. A smaller third room was probably added to the front of the western lower room at the same time in the 17th century. Services were later accommodated in the 19th century within a wing extending to the left of the lower western end. The overall plan is U-shaped, encompassing three sides of a front courtyard with the service wing extending leftward.

The building stands two storeys tall with an attic storey, arranged across five bays including the projecting gable end of the west wing. A brick plat-band runs horizontally across the façade. The main range features 12-paned sashes on each floor flanking blind windows to the right and doorways to the left. The upper doorway, which has no external access, has a door of nine panes over a two-panelled base; the ground-floor door is six-panelled with the upper four panels glazed. A porch canopy is supported on tapering octagonal timber posts. The courtyard-facing inner face of the west wing displays two 12-paned sashes above two doorways; a plank door sits to the left, while the right-hand door has nine panes over a two-panelled base. The plat-band is carried over the relieving arches as a continuous hoodmould. Twelve-paned sashes with slightly cambered heads flank this elevation. The inner face of the east wing has a pentice slate roof with a plank door near its left end.

Interior features include a fine dog-leg staircase in the main range rising to the attic storey, fitted with thick turned balusters, a moulded handrail, and square newels. Three-panelled doors open from landings to principal rooms. The west wing fireplace has a long chamfered lintel.

The roof structure remains largely intact. Six 17th-century raised cruck trusses support the west wing, each with two tiers of threaded purlins but no ridge purlin, and morticed and tenoned straight collars. Two further trusses span the main range, now plastered over but apparently of similar type with curved feet but no collars. This structure is impressively wide-spanned and late in date for this form of construction. The east wing preserves a single raised cruck truss with archbracing to the morticed and tenoned collar, forming a closed partition at the north gable end. Its inner face displays a large fragment of early 17th-century decorative plasterwork featuring a geometrical ribbed pattern of triple interlaced lozenges. Late medieval blind quatrefoil panels have been reset on the east wall during late 20th-century alterations. The front courtyard walls are built of stone rubble with centrally-placed ivy-clad gatepiers of square section, which contain fragments of medieval stonework.

East Barton was a principal seat of the Pollard family and is of considerable interest for its unusually early brickwork in this region.