Building record WTN 040 - Manor Farm

Manor Farm is a grade II* listed timber-framed building of great historic interest. Dating in part from the early-15th century the property was extensively altered during the late-16th and early-17th centuries and illustrates the dramatic improvement in domestic living conditions over the same period. The central room of the medieval house was open to its roof in the manner of a barn and heated only by a bonfire-like hearth that burnt on its clay floor. Sections of the original unglazed windows survive in situ, still heavily encrusted with 15th century soot and preserving evidence of unusual square-sectioned mullions. The hall was almost completely rebuilt around 1590 to incorporate a newly fashionable chimney, along with finely chamfered and carved ceiling joists and glazed oriel windows; within a generation the medieval storage rooms at the northern end of the hall were also rebuilt to form a spacious new parlour with its own chimney, but, remarkably, the original arched doors to these rooms were preserved between the two later structures. An exceptionally large new storage area, which probably operated chiefly as a dairy in this valley-bottom location, was added to the rear of the new parlour to create an L-shaped house with a stair tower in the angle of the two wings. The resulting property appears to have possessed an unusually sophisticated layout by the standards of its day, with a passage between the entrance and the stair that divided the two principal rooms in a style normally associated with Georgian buildings. Curiously, this new entrance passage lay on the opposite side of the original doorways to that of the medieval house. Having remained largely unchanged for many years, Manor Farm was dramatically restored in the Mock Tudor taste during the first half of the 20th century. A number of impressive architectural features, including oak panelling and a fine 17th century staircase were imported from elsewhere, and a series of gables with newly carved barge-boards was added to the façade. The resulting mixture of features and building phases has produced one of the most historically intriguing buildings in the county (S1).