The Rectory

The Rectory is a house of probable 17th and 18th-century origins, with a Victorian extension, situated in a village setting. The building is constructed primarily of ironstone with cream-coloured ashlar limestone quoins and plinth, and a slate roof. A three-storey extension to the north-east is built of red brick.

The house is composed of three distinct parts: a square southern section, possibly the oldest, with an ‘M’ profile roof aligned east to west; a six-bay Georgian wing along the western façade with a hipped roof, incorporating a northern bay of differing proportions; and the three-storey north-east extension, gabled to both north and south.

The main body of the building is two storeys high, with the three-storey brick extension to the north-east. The western elevation has six bays, with a wider northern bay and five bays arranged symmetrically to the south. The southern two bays contain blind windows. The northern bay is significantly wider and separated from the others by an ironstone buttress. The ground floor has six-over-six sash windows; the first floor has four. Window headers are made of narrow bricks or tiles, and the window jambs in bays two, three and four have surrounds of brick or tiles. The main entrance, in the fourth bay, is sheltered by a stone porch with Doric columns and a carved entablature.

The north side of the building is of rubblestone ironstone with limestone ashlar quoins, featuring a single ground-floor six-over-six sash window with red brick headers.

The rear eastern elevation combines ironstone and limestone rubble, with limestone ashlar quoins. It has a ground-floor six-over-six sash window and two first-floor windows, each with red brick surrounds and flat arches. A timber doorcase with a projecting cornice, seemingly a 21st-century replica, is also present. An iron beam is embedded between the ground and first floor levels. The southern half of this elevation is blank.

The southern elevation, also of ironstone and limestone rubble, faces a new Rectory and its garden. It’s arranged in five bays, with an entrance door in the third bay. All windows are six-over-six timber sashes with red brick surrounds; between the windows, timber blocks embedded in the masonry may be truncated remnants of a lost structure.

The Victorian red-brick extension to the north-east has two three-over-six sash windows on the ground floor of its north elevation and an asymmetrical arrangement of windows across two bays and three storeys on its east elevation; the upper windows are uPVC replacements.