From January to Easter 2026 the church will be closed while a new heating system is put in. For alternative venues see Sunday Services and Daily Use.
Conservation
During conservation over 25 years many interesting features were uncovered: Jacobean fireplaces and tinder closets, medieval foundations, a long gallery, 16th to 18th century signatures, even a love poem scratched into the plaster work. Research and restoration went hand in hand, met with general approval and the odd award, and we are still making discoveries. We lead tours of the house on periodic open days and have hosted the Fellows of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and several local history groups. Now, for the second time in history, the house is the home of the resident priest or parson for the village.
We dredged the large fish pond, one of three dug maybe around 1070 by Ivo de Ticheville, and one which was he gave with the church to Belvoir Priory, is frequented by mallards, coots, moorhens, Greylag geese and swans, all of which have nested here over recent years. Newts, frogs and a shoal of goldfish can often be seen, when they are not hiding from the local heron or the solitary black-cap gull which often finds asylum here. Fortunate visitors might also catch a glimpse of a kingfisher.
Oak
The inside of the house and the roof are held up by 14 massive oak beams and a thousand smaller timbers, all of which are being slowly munched away by beetle and fungi. Spectacular intervention with chunky godfathers has kept the place standing, and we alone have repaired some 400 timbers. Thanks to a bit of warmth to keep the oak dry, and Leonard our long-eared bat who likes a juicy death watch beetle or three, the old oak should stand up for another few centuries. Conservation is not only about repair, it's about understanding how things were newly made in days gone by. We trained first by copying the house roof in the new barn, and later in building the summerhouse.
summerhouse roof Swithland Slate
Some 100 tons of this Leicestershire slate, quarried at Swithland, Groby and Newtown Linford until 1887, covers all the roofs of our house, barn and garden wall. The award-winning main roof is all hung on oak pegs, and coated underneath with many layers of lime plaster. We had to find some 60 tons of old slate, sort it all into sizes, trim off the jagged edges, and drill many a new peg-hole. The result seems to be appreciated, as it adorns the front cover to the SPAB guide to Vernacular Roofing in the East Midlands, then again that was co-authored by the fellow whose work on the house won the award.
Alabaster
Gypsum, or alabaster, is mined locally. It used to be carved into statues until someone found it could be cooked and laid on reeds to make floors. The house contains 50 tons of it. Today nobody can remember how to cook gypsum for flooring, but after experimental floor repairs at this house, Simon has overseen the laying of a large new floor nearby, using only reed from the canal, lump gypsum ploughed up from restored mining land, four domestic ovens, a hired crusher, and a few bags of casting plaster. Possibly it's the first new plaster floor in England for 140 years.
Pictured here is a testing sample of new floor, sitting on a recently uncovered plaster window-sill in the Steward's Chamber, where he evidently whiled away the day playing Nine Men's Morris.
The house also retains some of the dairy fixtures from Victorian times when prize-winning Stilton cheese was made here, and it remains a working farmhouse. We re-opened the well that provided driking water until 1948, and we built a stone barn to replace the original knocked down in the 1980s.
Gardens have been laid out in keeping with the Jacobean style of the house. Cobble paths have been revealed and extended, York flagstone walkways laid, and traditional mud walls have been rebuilt around the perimeter. We built a green oak, daub and thatched summerhouse.
Finally, for our intrepid visitors, we refurbed the mud-walled back-to-back loos, Jakes and Privy, now CAMROT* approved.
If you'd like to read a blow by blow account of the work we have done, sit down comfortably and click here.
*Campaign for the Preservation of Real Outside Toilets, founded by Suffolk CAMRA after a heavy night.
