Middle House

Middle House is a farmhouse, now derelict, standing on Monk's Road on Malham Moor. The building dates from the mid-17th century, with probable early 18th-century porch and alterations, and underwent conversion to a farm building in the 19th century.

The structure is built of limestone and gritstone rubble with ashlar blocks to the porch and a graduated stone slate roof. It comprises 2 storeys across 3 bays still standing, with 2 bays ruined at the time of survey. The left-hand bay is an addition. The building features quoins throughout.

The standing bays include an ashlar single-storey porch on the right, which has a chamfered lintel and a recessed plaque with raised letters reading "H K". Recessed chamfered mullion windows are found throughout the building: the ground floor has 4-light and 2-light windows to bays 1 and 2 respectively, with the far left mullions missing and the bay 2 mullions hollow-moulded. The first floor contains three 2-light windows, with the central mullion lower and lacking the full mullion treatment. Hoodmoulds appear to windows on the left and above the porch. To the right of the porch was a blocked window, with left and right jambs remaining in the now ruined wall. A break in the building line at first-floor level between bays 1 and 2, and traces of a blocked doorway far left, indicate that bay 1 is an addition. A banded end stack stands at the far left. The roof of bays 3, 4 and 5 has collapsed, as have the front and east gable walls of bays 4 and 5, except for the blocked original doorway between these bays, which features chamfered quoined jambs and a triangular arched head under a square chamfer.

The rear walls survive to full height. A blocked central doorway stands opposite the porch entrance. All other openings are also blocked: a 2-light recessed chamfered mullion window to the right, a similar single-light window above, and another single light to the left. Remains of an external staircase and loading door exist between the door and the right-hand window, with a straight join visible between the right bay and the rest of the structure.

Internally, bay 1 contains a gable fireplace with a plain stone surround and a shallow curved recess with a blocked 2-light window in the partition wall between bays 1 and 2. The standing partition wall between bays 4 and 5 has a stone stack underbuilt in brick.

The house occupies the site of a possibly Norse settlement that was taken over as a grange of Fountains Abbey in the 13th century, when it was called Midlow House. The remaining house dates from the 17th century, when the farm was owned by the Knowles family. The plan of three rooms with a door opening into an unheated room, possibly a byre, indicates a hearth-passage arrangement. The porch was added in 1721 by Henry King, providing a new entrance into the living room or kitchen, with a narrower inner room probably divided into an unheated bedroom and larder. The left bay was added in the mid-to-late 18th century, possibly also by Henry King, and appears to have been a separate cottage; the curved recess is probably a built-in cupboard. Measured drawings from 1986 record a large inserted window to the right of the porch (possibly 18th century) and a 19th- or 20th-century east entrance to the right of the original doorway. The rear stairs and first-floor doorway indicate conversion of the house to agricultural use in the 19th and 20th centuries, when louvres were inserted into several front windows and the cart entrance opened up on the front.