4 & 5 Castle Terrace

Pair of large terraced houses at 4 & 5 Castle Terrace, painted stucco with slate roofs, brick dentilled eaves, and brick left end stack. Three storeys and cellar, four bays in total (two to each house).

The front elevation features later 19th-century moulded sill courses and large canted bay windows to each house with heavy moulded cornices, aligned centrally and with basement windows beneath. Paired central doorways: the left doorway to No 5 has a tall circa 1900 porch with matching moulded cornice and hipped metal roof; the right doorway to No 4 is plain and square-headed. Large 19th-century four-pane sash windows; those on No 5 are slightly shorter with sills above the string course, while those on No 4 have plain raised shouldered surrounds. No 4 has five stone steps to its doorway with a 20th-century door and overlight with fine late Georgian fan tracery. No 5 has two cemented steps and a grey stone top step to its porch, with a 20th-century porch door and large glazed overlight. Basement steps occur to the left of the bay window of No 4. Iron railings front the basement area of No 5. A large double rear range with rendered walls and double hipped roof is attached: No 4 is wider with 20th-century windows to the north end; No 5 has a 20th-century cross-window on each floor.

Passage halls lead from the front doors. No 5 has interior detail and stairs mostly altered in the later 20th century. No 4 retains significant late 18th-century detail: a fielded-panelled six-panel door in the entrance hall; a late 18th-century moulded cornice with anthemion ornament in the frieze and rosettes in the ceiling border; a moulded surround to the door to the east front room. A similar cornice and timber Adam-style late 18th-century chimneypiece occupy the east wall, featuring Ionic pilasters with delicate neoclassical ornament in the pilaster panels. The deep frieze and dentil cornice break forward over the pilasters, with a centre panel depicting griffins and an urn, outer draped festoons and wreath, and ornament also in the frieze blocks over the pilasters. Sunk panels appear in the reveals of the bay window. A plaster ceiling rose with anthemion surround and an elliptical hall arch on pilasters survive. Damaged stairs to the right lead to the basement and the main staircase beyond, which has later 19th-century twisted balusters (similar to those in No 74 Main Street), a panelled newel with ogee finials, a continuous rail, and open tread ends, rising in four flights to the top floor. A broad landing arch on the first floor connects through to No 5. First floor rooms are altered and fire damaged. No 5 has a simple two-flight stair, possibly a service stair. A large first floor rear room retains a scrolled ceiling border with square rosettes at the corners.

The cellars were not accessible at the time of survey. Those to No 4 run back from the street with a passage down the west side. A 17th or 18th-century front cellar, ceiled, contains roughly chamfered beams and joists. A 17th-century timber diamond-mullioned unglazed window on the west side wall comprises paired three-light openings with close-set hexagonal mullions. A very thick wall to the north separates these from medieval cellars beyond, containing within its thickness the stairs from the ground floor (opening into the passage) and a skewed passage between cellars (reusing a piece of roof truss as a lintel). The medieval cellars are aligned in series, with broad cambered vaults. To the left of the entrance passage at the south is a deep vaulted recess. A four-centred doorway in the west wall opens into the passage. The second cellar has a lower floor and lower vault but matches the width of the first and has an inserted north wall, with a short section of cellar beyond accessed from the passage. Some deep-splayed openings appear on the east side: two at the end of the first section, one larger in the second, and a straight-sided opening in the northeast corner. The west side has a splayed four-centred arched door at the centre of the first cellar. The doorway from the passage to the walled-off north end has square reveals and a cambered head. To the right of the main west door are three corbels supporting a chimneybreast on the floor above. The passage down the west side of the cellar is vaulted only at its north end, corresponding to the north section of the medieval cellar. The floor level slopes northward.