The Old Bell Museum

The Old Bell Museum is a former inn, dating to the 18th and 19th centuries, and now serving as a museum. The exterior is a mix of painted roughcast over rubble stone and painted brick, with a slate eaves roof and a brick stack on the right end. The building is two storeys high, with four bays, and features a prominent gabled porch bay in the third bay. The first three bays have a stone ground floor and roughcast upper section (over timber framing), while the fourth bay has been refronted with painted brick above a stone plinth.

The porch bay projects, and contains a tall, square-headed doorway with a ledged door and overlight, flanked by painted brickwork that formerly supported timber posts. The jettied first floor of the porch has a moulded bressumer and a small, Palladian, three-light window with leaded panes, set under a projecting gable supported by two large carved brackets. The gable also features a tie beam with a carved leaf tendril design. There are 19th-century or renewed bargeboards and a finial. The first bay has a small-paned cross-window with an iron opening light on the ground floor, and a small-paned casement pair above. The second bay features a triple casement window above a door, and a lean-to addition with a whitewashed brick facade and a slate roof connecting to the porch bay. This lean-to has a wide shop window with small panes – eight-pane top-lights over twelve-pane fixed lights (the left one boarded over). A later 19th-century triangular flat hood, supported by two wooden wall posts with carved jowl heads, shelters double doors leading to a former parlour. A pair of 19th-century leaded doors are set into the side of the lean-to. The fourth bay has a triple casement window to the first floor, and a leaded three-light ground floor window with top lights, set under a cambered brick head. A stone plinth conceals a basement opening.

At the rear left is a rubble stone wall with a small iron casement pair over a 19th-century painted brick lean-to. A single timber post is exposed centrally, and to the right, a rendered first floor has a small iron fixed light and iron casement pair over an enclosed porch and a small-paned cross-window. The rear wing is in two parts. The first part is of brick, in stretcher bond, with a single casement on the ground floor and a casement pair above, both with iron opening lights. The wall is stepped out, but under the same eaves. The ground floor is brick, and the upper section is rubble stone. Double doors lead into the wing, alongside a rubble stone gable end with a cambered-headed loft window.

Stone cobbled setts are laid in front of the building. Visible internally on the first floor of the porch wing is a close-studded timber structure. A rear room to the left of the cross passage has a large lateral stack with a bread oven, which may be a later addition. The building contains 19th-century and earlier fittings, and a three-bay roof with two trusses, said to be re-used, with traces of smoke-blackening.