Crogen

Crogen is a medium-sized country house displaying simple Regency Gothic style, though its picturesque asymmetry reveals earlier origins. It follows an irregular hall and cross-wing plan, with the wing as the surviving primary block. Further service ranges to the rear loosely enclose a courtyard. The house is constructed from local irregular stone with traces of former render, with slate roofs that are mostly shallow-hipped, featuring oversailing verges and plain bargeboards, and plain chimneys.

The primary eastern wing rises to two-and-a-half storeys and has a steeply pitched roof with a gable to the entrance front. This gable features a large four-light wooden 19th-century Gothic window with cusped upper lights, paired with French windows of three panes to each section, surrounded by stucco with a simple returned label. Above is a pointed-arched window of similar type with intersecting wooden tracery and small-pane glazing. This is an 1830s insert into a pre-existing tall window opening, which was correspondingly partly infilled. Of that earlier window, only the pointed-arched upper section remains—an early 14th-century sandstone work of good quality with cusped tracery lights that evidently originated as a two-light ecclesiastical tracery window.

The cross-wing's eastern elevation displays two large, early projecting lateral chimney stacks to the Solar wing, with triple offset stacks having moulded capping. The right-hand chimney has an arched window inserted at ground-floor level with masonry infilled flush, corbelling the chimney out at first-floor height. Between the two chimneys is an arched French window to the ground floor with a two-light window above, featuring pointed-arched heads and multi-pane lights with labels and surrounds as before.

A lower, two-storey porch extrusion adjoins flush with the wing to the left. This has an entrance with part-glazed doors and geometric glazing to the margins, with stucco surround and label. A two-light window to the first floor features intersecting tracery lights and small-pane glazing with similar surround and label; a 20th-century flagpole is affixed to the upper gable. Set back to the left of the porch are two further bays, the far left one gabled. French windows with surrounds to the ground floor—the left a two-light, the right four-lights—feature cusped tracery heads. The first floor has a two-light window with lozenge glazing to the left and a four-light window with simpler cusping to the heads and no label. The gabled section to the left has a broad storeyed canted bay projecting to its western return with a hipped roof.

Set back and half overlapping the rear gable of the Solar wing is a rectangular two-storey block with a large central stack and rendered eastern gable. A lean-to porch with slated roof and canted Gothic bay is extruded in the angle between this and the Solar block, with French windows featuring arched lights. A single-storey service range adjoins the rear block to the north, with a whitened inner elevation facing a small slate-flagged court. The outer garden elevation facing east has a three-light window with a depressed-arched garden niche to the right, with plain stucco surround; a large rectangular pitched-roofed louvre surmounts this block's roof.

To the north are two store buildings: the first has a mono-pitch corrugated asbestos roof with a boarded door facing the service court and a window with boarded shutter to the left; the second has a pitched slate roof with doorway and window to the south face. Adjoining this at right-angles to the west, separated by a short rubble wall, is a rectangular single-storey slated range with three 20th-century twelve-pane two-part casements to the north side; two boarded doors flank a square light to the right on the south side, with modern boarded garage doors to the west gable. This partly encloses a cobbled service court to the north, which leads from the narrow flagged yard to the rear of the main range. Closing this on the west side is a large 1830s three-storey service wing with a wide shallow-pitched roof and two central chimneys, the western one particularly large. It has a three-bay yard elevation with whitened ground floor, a boarded door to the right, and two-part twelve-pane casements to the upper floors with intersecting glazing bars. An entrance with boarded door appears on the north gable, with two blocked openings (former entrances) to its left; a simple triple-light Gothic window sits at first-floor level.

A rubble wall approximately two metres high adjoins this range to the right (west) and curves around in an arc to the north, defining the service court to the west; a wooden gate sits adjacent to the building. A broad full-height canted central bay to the storeyed service range projects into a narrow gravelled yard defined on the west side by sloping revetment walls, which return eastwards towards the house with the southern front lawns ramped up to effectively screen this service yard from view. Here four stone steps lead down to a coal shed with brick arch, boarded doors and a four-pane overlight.

The small entrance hall has a pointed-arched doorway to a stairwell beyond with a late 19th-century polychromed tiled floor. The Dining Room opens to the left and features a good Gothic sandstone fireplace in accomplished Perpendicular style, with pierced quatrefoil oculi and cusped, latticed frieze with foliated bosses to the moulded cornice. The room has a Gothick cornice of intersecting tracery and a wide Tudor-arched bay to the front with panelled blind-tracery architraves and three seven-panel doors; similar shutters and reveals complete the scheme. A narrow full-height well stair of circa 1830 features a swept mahogany rail and cast iron Gothic ogee balusters. The first-floor medieval Solar was originally open to the roof, now subdivided. It comprised four bays, and one original truss remains visible, showing a shallow pointed arch with moulded principals.