Low Broadwood Hall

Description

House dated '1716' on lintel, refenestrated c.1970, with outbuildings perhaps incorporating earlier fabric. Rubble, stone dressings, house roof C20 tiles, left outbuilding C20 metal roof, right outbuilding slate roof. 2 storeys, 4 bays. 3rd bay has C20 door in moulded surround with angular 4-centred head, sunk panels in spandrels and initials A on lintel, with date. C:L All windows C20. Left outbuilding 2 storeys, 2 bays. 2 inserted ground floor windows. Right outbuilding, former Quaker school, 2 storeys and attics, 3 bays, irregular. 2 blocked doors with later windows inserted, that to the right having a chamfered lintel and pieces of inscribed late C17 or early C18 stones (tombstones?) re-used in the jambs. 1st floor 2 2-light mullioned windows and one single light, all with chamfered surrounds, all blocked. Similar single-light window to attic. Left return of left outbuilding has boarded door with triangular-headed chamfered surround perhaps re-set. Rear elevation, contemporary outshut to house, various openings, some with chamfered surrounds. Interior altered. Wall running from rear right end of right outbuilding as far as heavy quoins. This is a section of a C16 house, demolished early C20, and includes a single-light window in a chamfered surround with heavy iron bars. (Listed Building Report)

Low Broadwood and Broadwood Hall form a single farm complex in and L-shape. Part of the short arm of the L-shape was pulled down in 1901 to create a garage, but a contemporary painting shows that the old building was a bastle. The long arm of the L-shape consists of three buildings. The first was unfortified and wass contemporary with the bastle. The third building is a barn with a boulder plinth still visible to show its bastle origins. (PastScape ref. Dodds 1999)

At Low Broadwood Hall are a group of 17th and early 18th century buildings. Low Broadwood Hall, still very much in the 17th century style, has its door lintel dated 1716; an outbuilding to the west has a four centred doorway, in the local bastle tradition, in its gable end, but its walls are not particularly thick. At the opposite end is a three storeyed building with blocked mullioned windows, said to have been a Quaker School. An older house stood to the north east of Low Broadwood Hall, and was demolished about 50 years ago; a painting of it is kept in the 19th century farmhouse. This older house was an L-plan building, with its main block apparently running north-south and a short wing projecting eastward at the north end; the painting shows this wing with a lower outshut on its south side. The building is said to have had living accommodation on the first floor above byres; there was a round headed arch at the south end (a bastle style byre doorway?), an external staircase to the first floor, and a stone newel stair from first to second floors. Some treads of this stair have been kept. All that now survives of the older house is the lower part of the northern half of the west wall, partly incorporated in a range of byres, and partly forming the rear wall to an open fronted shed. In this latter section is one original basement window, a chamfered square headed loop retaining its original iron bars. Further north the north west angle quoins of the building are visible. A doorhead from the original house has been reset in the range of byres facing the farmyard to the east; it has the date '1690' and initials 'H' above 'J B'. It appears that the old house at Low Broadwood was something rather grander than the usual Allendale bastle, and perhaps best classed as a strong house. It may well have been older than the '1690' doorhead, as conventional ground floor houses were being built in the area by this time (Ryder 1994-5). (Northumberland HER)