Foales Leigh

Foales Leigh

Farmhouse, dating from approximately the 16th century with alterations and additions from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The building is constructed of slate rubble, rendered at the front and with rendered slate hanging to the right end. The roof is covered in asbestos slate with gable ended wings and a half hip at the right end. The chimney stacks are rendered and axial, with large stone rubble projecting end stacks, all featuring set offs.

The house originally followed a three-room and through-passage plan, though it has been significantly altered. The lower end is positioned to the right. The front doorway to the passage now opens into the lower end of the hall, as the passage screen has been removed. The rear doorway of the passage is blocked. The present hall fireplace, located at the lower end, was inserted later into a stack that originally served the lower end room. The original hall fireplace was either at the higher end of the hall (now blocked) or in a truncated rear lateral stack. The lower end room retains a collar and truncated end stack.

A parlour wing in the 17th-century style was added at the upper end of the inner room, projecting to the rear and featuring an altered stack on the outer side. In the early 19th century, the inner room was converted into a staircase hall with stairs at the back and a doorway at the front. The original passage doorway was given a two-storey porch, now blocked. An outshut was added to the rear of the hall and possibly part of the lower end in the 18th or 19th century. A lean-to was added to the lower end.

The exterior is of two storeys with a cellar beneath the right end. The asymmetrical front elevation contains six windows: 19th and 20th-century casements of two, three and four lights with glazing bars. Slate dripmoulds decorate the left-hand ground and first-floor windows and the first-floor centre window. The left end is gabled. A gabled two-storey stone porch with a round arch is positioned left of centre, containing a plank door. The ground level falls away to the right, and the lower end of the house is built over a cellar accessible through a wide doorway on the front wall, flanked by large rendered buttresses. A lean-to outbuilding to the right of the lower end has a corrugated iron roof and features two rows of pigeon holes with slate ledges. A loft door at the rear of the lean-to has slate steps.

The rear wall is irregular and contains a blocked former passage doorway, a chamfered timber doorframe at the rear of the lower end, and a late outshut with blocked openings.

Internally, the original front doorway, now within the blocked porch, retains a heavy moulded timber doorframe with oval, fillet and hollow moulding and large baluster stops to the jambs. The large hall fireplace at the lower end of the hall has slate rubble jambs with rounded corbels supporting a massive slab of slate set vertically to form a canopy. The hall ceiling features rough chamfered beams: one cross beam and two axial beams. The higher end cross wing has rough ceiling beams with step stops. The cellar at the lower end contains a large open fireplace in the end wall with a massive vertically set slate lintel and a chamfered ceiling beam with step hollow stops and square section joists. An early 19th-century staircase, inserted into the former inner room, has turned newels, stick balusters and chamfered square newels at the top, with the handrail ramped up to the newels. The roof over the hall is a 19th-century replacement; the roof over the lower end was not inspected. The cross wing roof is largely a 19th-century replacement except for two trusses at the front, which retain straight principals with two tiers of threaded purlins and a threaded ridge.