| Description | West Royd, Warley. 17th century stone house.
West Royd was the subject of an archaleogical assessment by Colum Giles in 1980 as part of the WYAAS/RCHME Rural House Survey. The photographic images and sketch plan produced by the assessment are held by WYAAS (Giles, C. (WYAS/RCHME). 1980). The fieldwork report is transcribed below:
'This is a stone house, dated 1624. The date stone is, however on the lintel of a door which has been inserted, and it is not certain that the date applies to the construction of the house. The original doorway has an inscribed lintel also; the date is illegible but the initials 'M M' which appear here are the same as those on the inserted lintel. The date on the lintel is probably, therefore, a fairly close guide to the date of the house.
The interior of the house was not inspected, and these notes are drawn from the evidence of the exterior. The house is of two storeys and is built of thin coursed rubble masonry, quoined at the angles. The south front of the house has windows with recessed splayed mullions; the ground floor windows have transoms. A hood mould unites the windows to fire area, housebody and parlour; it has decorative label stops. The inserted doorway interrupts the hood mould; it has an elaborately moulded surround (roll, step, step and cyma), in the spandrels appear the initials 'M M' and the lintel bears the date 1624. Over the lintel two label stops, in the form of spirals, have been re used, breaking the hood mould over the two adjacent windows. A further hood mould runs over the west cell and main doorway; to the west it ends in a decorative stop, but to the east, beyond the doorway, it returns as if to run vertically upwards. The reason for this is not clear. The main doorway has a four centred head and a chamfered surround, and the lintel is faintly inscribed 'M M 16??'. At the rear of the house the detail is less elaborate; the windows have mullions, some recessed and some flush with the surface of the wall. The north door to the passage has a decorative lintel.
The plan of the house seems to have been conventional. The main door led into a passage running right through the house, dividing the extremely long lower end from the rest of the range. The housebody was heated by a firehood backing onto the passage, and to the east lay a parlour, perhaps with an original stack on the gable wall. The east cell seems to have been subdivided, for a blocked window in the gable wall suggests that to the north of the parlour lay an unheated service room.
N.B. Plan shows that east gable stack [as] an addition as it blocks gable window. Position of window indicates that end cell was not subdivided; window central to gable wall lighting parlour'.
(Giles, C. (WYAS/RCHME). 1980. 'West Royd, Warley').
In addition, a hand written note [on the back of a stage production ticket] records the remains of a decorative plaster frieze in an upper room. It is initialled 'M M 163?'. 'M M' refers to Martin Milnes (Thornborrow, P.H. (WYAS). 1986). |