Description

LUPPITT WICK ST 10 SE 10/83 Lower Wick Farmhouse (formerly listed as Moorswick) 22.2.55 GV II Farmhouse. Late C15 - early C16 with major later C16 and C17 improvements, C19 extensions. Local stone and flint rubble, some of it facing cob; the hall stack is stone rubble with a stone rubble chimneyshaft, the others are C19 and C20 and brick; thatch roof. Plan and development: 4-room-and-through-passage plan house facing south-east and built down the hillslope. Uphill at the right (north-east) end is the former inner room dairy or buttery. It is terraced into the hillslope and its gable-end stack is a C20 insertion. Next to the inner room is the hall with an axial stack backing onto the passage and there is newel stairs rising behind it against the rear wall. The passage rear doorway is now blocked. Below the passage there are 2 unheated service rooms but the end (south-western) one is a C19 extension. C19 kitchen outshot to rear of the first service room and it has a lower end stack. The smoke- blackened roof proves that the original house was open to the roof from end to end, it was heated by an open hearth fire and was divided by low partition screens. In the early to mid C16, a first floor chamber was built over the inner room dairy/buttery. Next, in the mid or late C16 the hall stack was inserted. There was probably some lower end or passage chamber built at the same time. However the passage and service end were rebuilt and enlarged in the mid C17; this section is slightly wider than the rest. The hall was also floored over in the mid C17. The kitchen was added in the C19 with the extra service room. Before that the hall was the only heated room. Main house is 2 storeys. Exterior: irregular 5-window front of C20 casements most with a diamond lead effect. The passage front doorway is roughly central and it contains a C20 part- glazed door behind a contemporary slate-roofed porch. Another doorway with similar porch at the left end. Above the hall stack oven housing there is Westminster Insurance Plaque dated 1727. The roof is gable-ended to right and hipped to left. Interior: the passage lower screen has narrow close-set studs and the crossbeam in the service end room is chamfered with exaggerated scroll stops (there is a similar axial beam in the hall). All these features are mid C17. The hall fireplace is Beerstone ashlar with an oak lintel and chamfered surround with the remains of pyramid stops. At the upper end of the hall is a large framed partition which may originally have been a low partition screen. It contains a blocked doorway which once had some kind of shaped head. The first floor partition above is secondary. In the inner room there is a chamfered and step-stopped axial beam. The roof over the passage, hall and inner room is carried on side-pegged jointed cruck trusses and all the timbers are sooted from the original open hearth fire. The first floor partition over the upper end of the hall is smoke-blackened on the hall side only. Lower Wick Farmhouse forms a group with its farmbuildings which are ranged around a cobbled farmyard. It also forms a group with other listed houses in the hamlet of Wick.

Listing NGR: ST1713303846

External Links

• Wikidata Q26461669

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Recommended Books

• 
  Oxfordshire (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  ENGLAND GUIDE TO POST WAR LISTED: A Guide to Post-war Listed Buildings
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  Worcestershire Revised Edition (Buildings of England) (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Pevsner's Architectural Glossary (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Introductions)
• 
  Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Peterborough (Pevsner Architectural Guides) (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Staffordshire (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)