Building record 0437310000 - RED LION COTTAGES

Dimensions - Length 20m, Width 6m.
Red Lion Cottage was the house of one of the smaller yeomen, though the building is not at all typical of its class. It is of two and a half timber-framed bays, and is now flanked by separate dwellings of one bay each, added in the late eighteenth century. It is of two full storeys throughout. An axial brick stack occupies the half bay of the original house. Its four flues serve two fireplaces on each floor, so that all four rooms were originally heated. A surviving fireplace has a four-centred arch of moulded plaster over chamfered brick. Probably there was a lobby entrance, but it has not survived; nor has the original access to the first floor.
If there was ever an unheated bay it has left no trace. Since there are mortices for window mullions in the south gable, such a bay can only
have lain to the north. But the north bay is a rebuild: there are no windbraces, the posts have no jowls, and the purlins are of western red cedar. A hearth recently found under the floor of the north bay indicates the presence of an earlier open-hall house on the site. It was made of tiles set on edge in a herring-bone pattern.
On the south east corner of the older part of the house is a structure of brick, enclosing a six foot cube (1.82 m). At a height of c. 4' within this is a floor of 1' square tiles (0.093 m2), resting on a grid of brick walls built so as to leave a clear central passage, with three spaces on either side. These were found to be loosely packed with large flints. A chimney rose from the west end of the central passage; the nineteenth-century occupants of the south cottage inserted a fireplace at its base. It is suggested that this was a malt-kiln. One of the late seventeenth-century occupants, Thomas Glenister, was a maltster, and there may have been earlier malting here. The evidence for this is a brick-lined conduit running under the house from east to west. Its
line, if produced, would run through the site of a filled-in pond in the garden. Malting needs plentiful supplies of water to steep the grain; and since the conduit passes under the stack, it must be contemporary with, or earlier than, the house. Documentay evidence suggests 1619 or a little later, the most likely date for the building of Red Lion Cottage, by Henry Ball. [Historical discussion; plan, sections & cut-away elevation] (B4).
Grade II. Early C17 central section, refaced and added to C18. Red brick. Old tile roof hipped at north end. Old brick stack in centre. Six casements to ground floor, two modern glazed doors and two modern enclosed porches with tiled roofs. Six casements to first floor, 2 and 3 light. Interior: central two bays have C17 timber framing and chimney stack with fireplaces on both floors. Remains of original gable window internally (B5).