Building record BXF 052 - The Lodge, Stone Street

The original building consisted of a long, low structure of five equal bays that extended to 60 feet in length by 18 feet in width and was entirely undivided in the manner of a barn. The bays were separated by open trusses consisting only of wall posts, tie-beams and arch braces, of which only the posts and fragments of tie-beams now survive. Empty mortises for the missing braces remain visible in the exposed front posts. The building probably faced the field to the rear rather than the adjacent road, and is likely to have been designed as a barn or possibly a livestock shed in the late-15th or 16th century. Precise dating and interpretation is hampered by the loss of the original roof to fire in the 1980s, and by the complete concealment of the present rear wall.

During the second quarter of the 17th century the building was converted into a pair of domestic tenements of unequal proportions. New ceilings were inserted throughout, together with two single-flue chimneys. The smaller of the two tenements lay to the right of the house and extended as far as the present post in the centre of the principal sitting room. It contained an unheated parlour of 8 feet in length that was divided from a hall of 10 feet by a chimney in the position of the modern staircase. This chimney has since been removed, but its position is revealed in the chamfering of the adjacent ceiling beams. The larger tenement contained a hall of 12 feet that extended from the surviving fireplace to the aforementioned central post, which occupies the location of the partition between the two houses (removed when the cottages were subsequently amalgamated). The second parlour contained 11 feet, and adjoined a small storage room of 7 feet in length at the left-hand end of the building (occupied by the modern kitchen). The rooms of the left-hand tenement were larger and its ceilings decorated with more elaborate ‘notched’ chamfers stops, suggesting that the owner of the converted property may have occupied this end of the structure while leasing the other. The chimney of the smaller tenement may have consisted of cheaper timber-framing rather than brick as it was unable to support the lateral joist of its hall ceiling (which was secured to the external walls by means of tusk tenons, while the principal joist of the larger hall was embedded in its chimney breast) (S1)