Porch House And Front Railings

Porch House and Front Railings

A house of complex build history, now consolidated into a single dwelling from what was once divided into three. The structure contains late 16th-century fabric that was substantially altered in the late 17th century, around 1780, and again in 1844. The house is partly timber-framed, enclosed in brick, with a brick roof of pantiles dated 1781. The front railings are 19th-century cast iron.

The house presents two storeys with one window to the left of the first floor and four windows to the right. The left range is a cross-wing rebuilt around 1780, standing taller and projecting forward, constructed in brick laid in Flemish bond. It features a four-panel door below an overlight with a first arch, a two-storey canted bay window with pebble-dashed panels and sash windows with small panes, dentil eaves, and a hipped roof with a ridge stack in the centre of the left return. The centre section comprises 1½ bays of a timber-framed open hall dating to around 1584, with a floor inserted in the late 17th century and later altered in the late 18th century. A rear wing was added in the mid-17th century and subsequently altered in the 18th century and around 1844. The hall range is brick in English garden wall bond, with three-light side-sliding sash windows on both floors and a flat arch to the right, together with a stack to the right. A single-storey sandstone ashlar porch, probably dating to 1844, replaces a two-storey timber-framed porch dated 1674 which gave the house its name; it features a vertical panelled door with an ogee-shaped lintel, coped gable with apex final, and stone slat roof. The right range contains 20th-century casement windows, smaller on the first floor and all with flat arches, modillion eaves, and a roof hipped to the right with a wrought-iron lamp bracket at the right corner. The right return has a blocked ground-floor opening, a band, a first-floor side-sliding sash window, and a ridge stack.

The front railings are wrought iron, set upon a low ashlar wall, with square-section bars having spaer finials flanked by scrolls.

Interior features are significant. The hall contains an ingle beam and a late 19th-century cast-iron kitchen range by R P Reay & Co of Stockton on Tees. A large 17th-century stop-chamfered beam at the rear post bears a re-cut inscription, accompanied by stop-chamfered thin joists. A room to the far right contains reset timber, probably from the porch, bearing raised characters reading "1674 WM AM". The first floor has butt-jointed floorboards, jowled posts, and two low curved tie-beams, one possibly from a smoke hood. The principal rafter roof trusses feature halved apexes and two sets of through purlins. The left wing contains a front drawing room with a moulded cornice and a rear dining room with an arched recess from a previous staircase, together with an 18th-century fireplace on the first floor. The rear right wing has no floor and is said to have been used formerly as a solicitor's office as a two-storey space.

The house is associated with the Metcalfe family. A beam exposed during alterations in 1844 bore the inscription "RM 1584 MM" (Richard and Margaret Metcalfe). The carved inscription in the porch gable read "WM 1674 AM" (William and Anna Metcalfe, née Marwood), with a piece of timber bearing this inscription now inside the house. Their daughter Margaret married Daniel Lascelles, Member of Parliament for Northallerton in 1702. Local tradition records that King Charles I stayed at the house twice, in 1640 and again in February 1647. Mrs Anne Metcalfe left to live in York between 1780 and 1784 while the family home underwent repair, during which the thatched roof was replaced with pantiles. A pantile has been found bearing the date 1781 and the maker's name, Watson of Thirsk. The railings in front of the house, probably dating to around 1844, were necessary to protect the property when the cattle market was held in the High Street; most houses in the street had them, though most have since been lost.