3 Mill Bridge, Skipton

Cottage originating in 1675 with alterations from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

The building is constructed of rendered and painted gritstone with uncoursed rubble and quoins, beneath a pitched stone-flag roof. It is situated on a steeply sloping site on the east side of the canal with a tiered garden, and has an approximately square plan.

The building is two storeys high with mass wall construction and contains two chimneysstacks: an in-set brick chimney to the east gable dating from the 19th century and a lateral rendered chimneystack to the south elevation. A further internal west gable end chimney is now truncated and roofed over.

The north elevation facing Mill Bridge now forms the front entrance. It contains three bays with a lateral 19th-century chimneystack in the central bay, formerly shared with an adjacent building now demolished. To the left is a 19th-century doorway with an early-20th-century half-glazed door of six panes with bulls-eye glass. To the right of the chimney is an early-20th-century aperture, now a window, with a rough timber lintel and stone tiled sill. Above the door on the first floor is a window with a tooled stone lintel and sill containing a 19th-century one-over-one pane horned sash window.

The west gable elevation faces the canal and is of three storeys, stepping back in stages as the wall rises with quoins to the south-west corner. The basement is of coursed stone and rubblestone with the ground-floor wall set back with thick rendering, formerly with ashlar detailing, between two ground-floor windows. The large left window has a 19th-century stone window surround with a three-over-three pane un-horned sash window. To the right is a small window with a stone lintel and one-over-one pane fixed window. The first floor has a tall window with a deeply inset two-over-two pane sash window to the right of a small window with deeply inset one-over-one fixed pane window.

The east gable elevation adjoins 1a Mill Bridge, which has a lower pitched roof, with a red brick chimney at the gable apex.

The south elevation was originally the front elevation. On the right-hand side of the ground floor is a 17th-century finely dressed chamfered basket-arch doorway with square stops to the jambs. The substantial door head retains a datestone with three recessed plaques bearing the words '16', 'MEG' and '75'. It contains an unusual half-glazed door with various blacksmithed fittings, including a nine-paned horizontally pivoting window, door latches and substantial straight and L-shaped hinges. To the left of the doorway is a chamfered window opening with a finely chamfered and recessed two-light stone mullion window with moulded paned windows and two external iron bars. The window originally extended further west but no external trace is now visible. On the first floor, from left to right, are three windows: a squat window with rubble stone sill and a Yorkshire sliding sash, an off-set central window with a 24-paned wooden window and a narrow one-over-four pane fixed window to the right.

Interior

The south entrance door opens into a large stone-flagged ground floor room with two cross beams aligned north to south, both running into the wall above the northern fireplace. The finely stop-chamfered west beam is bedded into the partially blocked south mullion window, suggesting it was inserted in the 1700s with the introduction of the first floor. The east beam is more irregular with roughly hewn chamfers and is reinforced by 19th-century timbers attached to each side by heavy iron bolts. The underdrawn lath and plaster ceiling, with some 21st-century patch repairs, conceals the joists above except for later reinforcing beams inserted above the cross beams, which have four square cut joists of variable widths jointed into them.

The stone mullioned south window, to the left of the 17th-century doorway, has a window seat with a splayed left side and straight right jamb. A painted stone post is inserted into the right jamb to support the embedded west beam above. Positioned in line with it and below the cross beam is a 20th-century stud wall with a re-sited 18th-century moulded five-panelled door in a 20th-century architrave to a kitchenette in the south-west corner. The return stud wall to the north has 20th-century panelling re-using 18th-century moulded studs with a small bracketed 20th-century shelf above.

Within the kitchenette is a blocked south window with a chamfered surround and a recessed stone window, similar to the adjacent 17th-century mullioned window but without a mullion, remodelled into a niche with 18th or 19th-century shelving. The west wall has a splayed walk-in window with a small box niche in the left-hand splay and a large splayed 19th-century window to the right of a potential blocked fireplace. The north wall has a 19th-century fireplace with a monolithic lintel and exposed rubble jambs with an inbuilt stone platform. To its left is a deep window with a suspended window sill and breeze-block infill below, indicating a former doorway which led into the abutting building to the north until the 20th century. The east wall has a blocked access door to the left with three stone flagged steps rising up to the neighbouring building. Its lintel cuts through the ceiling and floor of the room above to bridge the height difference between the buildings. To the right of the door is a projecting boxed feature concealing a potential fireplace.

The first floor is accessed by a central 20th-century stair. The east room contains the stair with a narrow stepped landing to both rooms, which have wide 18th-century floorboards aligned north to south and 19th-century skirting; some floorboards in the east room are concealed by a 20th-century raised platform. The south wall has two 18th-century windows: the narrow left window has a dressed square cut stone lintel and stone sill with a curved splay to the right jamb, whilst the right window has a stone sill and an S-shaped timber lintel. To the right is a half-splayed 19th-century window with a rough timber lintel and planed wooden sill. An eastern fireplace is now concealed.

The west room is entered through the plank and muntin cross-wall which rests on a beam set on the ground-floor cross beam and below the upper-floor chamfered tie beam. Struts and plaster panelling, exposed to the east and plastered to the west, divide the space above between the tie-beam and purlins. The room contains a 17th-century fireplace with a chamfered lintel and basket arch opening, with the flue in the thickness of the high gabled wall. To either side of the fireplace are windows. The small left window has a roughly hewn wooden window lintel and stone sill, and to the right is a substantial 19th-century window with a wooden lintel and sill. The south wall has a Yorkshire sliding sash window with a dropped wooden sill forming a window seat and an irregular wooden lintel.

The roof structure comprises a roughly hewn and chamfered north-south aligned tie-beam supporting a chamfered principal rafter roof with trenched pairs of through purlins. Further roof detailing is concealed behind 18th-century plasterwork. The tie beam is bedded into the masonry walls but supported by a rubble corbel to the north. The purlins are supported on wooden wedges and the upper north purlin in the east room is trenched into a substantial wooden block where it abuts to the east wall. There is at present no evidence for a cellar or basement despite the height of the external basement.