Winderwath House

House. The house dates from the mid-17th century, incorporating medieval features, with substantial 19th and 20th century additions and alterations. The walls are painted stucco with red sandstone dressings, covered by a graduated greenslate roof with banded, cement-rendered chimney stacks. The main facade is two storeys and five bays; the original house is set at an angle to the rear, with a lower two-storey, three-bay section. The 19th-century facade features an off-centre Tudor-arched doorway. Sash and mullioned-and-transomed windows are set within hoodmoulds in the central three bays, with a two-storey canted bay window to the left under a gable. A larger projecting gabled bay with a two-storey canted bay window sits to the right. A reused coat-of-arms panel, the identification of which remains unknown, is set into the right return wall. The original section of the house has a 20th-century door set within a 17th-century moulded doorcase with enriched pilasters, a console-bracketed enriched frieze and cornice, over which are the Clifford arms. There are 19th-century stone-mullioned windows of two, four and six lights. A two-storey bay window is present to the right, and a fragment of wall with 20th-century battlements is located to the left, alongside a 20th-century lean-to extension. At the rear is a 20th-century flat-roofed extension. Within the rear of the 19th-century additions are a reused, inverted panel of unidentified arms and a grotesque medieval head. The interior of the older section of the house contains a 15th-century trefoil-headed rear window, now internal, within an extremely thick wall, believed by the owner to represent a former chapel within the medieval house. The dining room has a 17th-century fireplace featuring rusticated jambs, a hood, enriched Ionic pilasters, a frieze with blank shields and a wreath, and a moulded cornice. There are further contemporary fireplaces in the kitchen and bedroom above. A pointed-arched blocked doorway in the gable wall is thought by the owner to be the original doorway leading into a 'pele tower', though the layout suggests a 15th-century hall rather than a 14th-century tower, and no documentary evidence supports the existence of a tower on this site. The house belonged to the Clifford family before being purchased in the 17th century by Thomas Braithwaite. It was bought by William Wyvill before his death in 1658, subsequently sold by his family to the Hasells of Dalemain in 1787. From the Hasells, it passed to the Salmonds, who first rented and then sold the house to James Atkinson, who in turn sold it to William Langrigg in 1893. The house served as an old folks' home during the 1939-45 war, and has since been in the possession of the Pollock family.