Linton Court And Associated Garden Walls (Including That Part To The Rear Of Weaver'S Cottage)

Linton Court is a house built around 1780 on what was then the southern edge of Settle town centre, positioned on the east side of the Keighley to Kendal turnpike road. It represents an early example of a town house set back from the street with a front garden—a fashionable approach not widely adopted until after the Napoleonic Wars.

Materials and Construction

The front (east) elevation is constructed of gritstone ashlar with distinctive diagonal furrowed tooling. The sides and rear are coursed rubble finished with lime render. Sandstone dressings are used throughout, and the roof is covered with stone slates.

Plan and Layout

The house has a double-pile plan of three bays and two storeys. A central entrance hall leads through to a central stair hall at the rear.

Exterior Description

The symmetrical front elevation features projecting quoins and cill bands to both floors. At the centre is a recessed Tuscan porch housing a six-panelled door, with outer pilasters and an inner pair of columns supporting a plain frieze and moulded cornice. The flanking windows on both floors are tripartite with plain projecting surrounds and rounded mullions. The central lights are stepped up and fitted with horned nine-over-nine sashes, whilst the narrower side lights have two-by-six fixed lights. The central first-floor window is a nine-over-nine sash. Simply moulded modillions support the guttering, which takes the form of a moulded cornice. The roof has plain verges and end ridge stacks.

The rear elevation is asymmetric, with the central tall stair window rising above the garden door, all slightly offset to the left (north). Between this and the windows of the southern bay there is a smaller window on each floor, these appearing to be 19th-century insertions. The stair window is round-headed with relatively thick glazing bars supporting small panes and is probably original. The other principal windows are eight-over-eight hornless sashes with thin glazing bars, probably early 19th-century replacements. The small first-floor window has a horned sash. All openings have plain projecting sandstone surrounds.

The south gable has a near-central door to the service corridor, protected by a porch formed by three projecting stone slabs. There is a small single window on each floor, including a central attic window, all with sandstone surrounds.

The north gable features a projecting drip course towards the centre, suggesting a blocked side entrance to the rear room. The attic window has been reduced in width, probably in the 19th century.

Interior Features

The entrance and stair halls are divided by a broad basket arch. The floor, which runs through both spaces, is laid with Victorian encaustic tiles. The dog-legged staircase is late 18th century with turned balusters supporting a composite moulded handrail. All downstairs rooms retain window shutters and six-panelled doors, some with original ironmongery, though the doors to the front reception rooms may be 19th-century replacements.

The front left (south) room has an ornate fireplace surround and mantle similar to 18th-century Adams fireplaces and may thus be original, although the fireplace itself is a modern alteration. The ceiling is corniced, incorporating plastered ceiling beams into the design. The front right room is now a kitchen and has a large inserted opening (now infilled) to the room to the rear, probably a Victorian alteration originally fitted with folding doors. The rear right room has a late 19th-century fireplace incorporating pictorial tiles. In the position of the possible blocked external doorway there is a built-in dresser. To the rear left is the original kitchen, a stone-flagged service corridor, and access to a small brick-vaulted cellar.

The first floor retains six-panelled doors and three cast-iron fireplaces: two being late 19th-century round-backed fireplaces, one being an 18th- or early 19th-century hob grate. The roof structure is largely original with hewn timbers that are pegged. Trusses are A-frames supporting staggered purlins. The rafters are modern replacements.

Subsidiary Items and Garden Walls

The front garden walls are ashlar and ramp up to the house to frame the façade. To the left on the street frontage there is an archway to the drive. On this drive, adjacent to the doorway to the front garden, is a two-step mounting block.

The drive serves a two-storey range of rubble stone outbuildings that backs directly onto 1-3 Commercial Courtyard to the south (which are not included in this designation). This range is shown on early maps as being divided into five units but has been converted into two units (4A and 4B Duke Street). The range incorporated a coach house (now a garage) and a hay loft, indicated by two round pitching openings. It probably also included at least one loose box, although evidence for this has been obscured by altered openings. The range includes one hornless sash window which is likely to be original.

Opposite the range there is a rainwater tank formed from large stone slabs jointed with iron straps. This tank is fed from the house roof and carries an inscribed date of 1848.

To the north of the house there is a small enclosed cobbled yard. The doorway to this yard from the garden has a Classical sandstone doorcase. The wall to the rear garden is over three metres high and constructed of coursed rubble with a simply dressed round-topped coping. The original garden to Linton Court has been subdivided with a lower stone wall that is not of special interest, but the original extent of the garden is still largely defined by the high stone walling.

The north wall of the garden runs from the north side of the house, initially running along the rear (southern) wall of a building to the north, then becoming a freestanding garden wall before abutting the south-eastern corner of a stone barn. This barn then abuts the east side of Weaver's Cottage, Kirkgate, so that the southern walls of the barn and Weaver's Cottage form a continuation of the original garden boundary. The original western garden boundary runs south from the south-west corner of Weaver's Cottage, returning east in line with the rear of 4A Duke Street. The west wall has two inserted openings and the south wall has been partially replaced with a new building.

Historical Development

The first edition of the 1:10560 Ordnance Survey map published in 1851 clearly shows the house together with a large rear garden with its coach house and other outbuildings on the south side. However, because of the scale of the map, the depiction of garden walls is far less clear, with the northern wall appearing to be interrupted and the western wall possibly being absent. The next edition of the map (the 1894 1:2500) clearly shows the full circuit of walls.

The house appears to have undergone some minor alterations in the 19th century, including the subdivision of one of the upstairs bedrooms (including the insertion of a window to the rear), the creation of a large opening between two of the reception rooms, and the blocking of a side entrance. These alterations may have been contemporary with the dated rainwater tank to the rear of the house (1848). These improvements may also have prompted the building of the high garden walls to provide security and privacy to Linton Court from the lower-class courtyard housing and cottages to the north.