(Grade II listed in 1956, and now listed Grade I)
(Grade II listed in 1956, and now listed Grade I)
"Dairy House" or "Gate House" ? In Eric Ricketts' speculative drawing of how Abbotsbury Abbey might once have appeared to the pilgrim visitors, this house is the little one down on the extreme bottom right hand corner. (The fact that it looks so little only shows just how large the Abbey itself must have been.)The answer to the question all depends on your point of view. What you see from Church Street is the back of the house, not the front. It was originally a gate house ~ but to where ? "The Abbey precincts" seems the obvious answer, but English Heritage and the occupants' architect share the theory that it was the gatehouse to the original tithe barn. Medieval Abbeys were hugely rich, their storehouses functioned like banks and were protected by walls and nearby gatehouses. The room above the gateway here may have been the "chequer", where tithes were counted, similar to the room above the porch to today's Tithe Barn which, according to this hypothesis, replaced an earlier barn close to this building. As to the gate element, imagine the great arch by the gable end of the house being opened up for carts to pass under, and the function of the building becomes clearer.
The building had not been a dairy for years (the Parish Council complained in 1948 about the state of the pavement here due to lorries collecting milk churns), and stood semi-derelict after years of being two separate cottages: how it looked in those days can be seen from the photograph on the right, loaned by Iris Trevett.
Margaret Berry restored the building in the 1970s ~ the work can be seen in progress in the left-hand photograph above ~ and turned it into two houses: hence the two "front doors" in Church Street, one of which is now inaccessible. The conversion, which took two years and went well over budget, encountered problems ~ Mrs Berry was, naturally, obliged to preserve the superb internal archway that had once been the outer face of the gateway, and tried to resolve matters with a spiral staircase and a mezzanine floor. That work has now gone, and the arch stands proud once more, though the restoration disturbed a swarm of bees which stopped work for two days.
The house then passed to a solicitor, who removed the dividing walls, but never used the part nearest the village. He also held a paddock across the road from the Dairy house and part of the Manor House garden. A land exchange was agreed, by which the Manor House gained more ground and took on the care of the paddock.
The present occupants turned it into a family home in 1984, opening up the unused attic floor, and entirely rebuilding the would-be garage as a traditional cottage once they realised it had no foundations. They believe that their house has three distinct parts. Looking at it from Church Street, the left and highest block is the original 14th century gatehouse, with its two arches and gatekeeper's lodging. The outside steps leading to the first floor lodgings door (now a large arched window) have left indentations discernible on the outside wall. The southern buttressed wall shows signs of where the original wall enclosing the barn would have joined it. The northern (internal) wall of this section is also buttressed and even older, possibly as early as the 11th century, and is thought to have been the outside wall of an earlier barn, the far end of which was uncovered when the Manor House moved its drive and gate to its present position in the 1980s.
The right-hand part of the house, nearer the village and further away in the photographs above, is late 17th century, while the west wing, which for years blocked the large internal arch, is thought to date from the 16th or 17th century.
The 2003 Conservation Plan may differ on matters of detail, but the authors agree that the house has a medieval core and "displays an immense quantity of archaeological and architectural detail", though they go on to suggest that it is just possible that the piers of the so-called "Outer Gatehouse" may have originally been part of the northern end of this building.
On a domestic note, the occupants comment that when they first moved in, the grounds of the Manor House with its tennis court, combined with their own unplanted garden and a 1970s swimming pool, marred the view from the Chapel, making Broad Meadow look as if it bordered a country club. Since then, trees and shrubs planted in both gardens, and the lake in the Manor House grounds have concealed much, though adding considerably to the mosquite population.