| Description | Slode (house), Warley. Stone house with 1662 datestone.
Slode was the subject of an archaeological assessment by Colum Giles in 1980 as part of the WYAS/RCHME Rural Houses Survey. The photographic images and sketch plan produced by the assessment are held by WYAAS. The fieldwork report is transcribed below:
'This is a stone house, showing a datestone which reads 'I S F 1662'. It is not clear whether the stone is in it original position, nor whether it refers to the date of construction of this building. The date would, however, agree with some of the features still surviving in the house, and may be accepted as a guide to the date of the original structure.
The house faces south, is of two storeys, and has a main range of two rooms supplemented by a rear wing to the west and an outshut to the north east. The south front of the house retains no early features apart from the datestone, which is set over the door at the south west corner. The masonry has been rendered, making it impossible to determine either the nature of the walling or the number, extent and site of earlier apertures. The door opened in to the main room, the house body, which is heated by a fireplace set in a large stack in the central dividing wall. To the east is the parlour, heated by a gable stack.
Behind the parlour lies the outshut; this retains some early fenestration, the windows having splayed mullions flush with the surface of the wall. At the north west angle of the house is a storeyed rear wing. Its west wall is clearly a rebuild, for there is a straight joint between wing and main range and the masonry here is watershot. The north and east walls of the wing, however are in an earlier masonry style and retain some early windows. The wing is, therefore, of early date, but was perhaps, added to the house, possibly as a replacement for an outshut behind the housebody, some years or decades after the construction of the main range. The way in which the east wall runs over the surround of the window at the west end of the outshut confirms the idea that the wing is an addition'.
(Giles, C. (WYAS/RCHME). 1980. 'Slode, Warley'). |