Wooley Farm Bastle complex - West Range

Description

House, early C18 built onto south end of C16 or early C17 bastle. House rubble with cut quoins and dressings, bastle heavy rubble with massive quoins. House has stone slate roof with corniced gable stacks. Front 2 tall storeys, 2 bays: renewed door in chamfered surround with remains of moulded cornice; to left 16-pane sash, to right 16-pane fixed stair window. 1st floor left 16- pane sash, right blocked 2-light mullioned window. All windows have chamfered surrounds and have been mullioned. Ruined bastle to right has off-centre chamfered doorway with flattened Tudor-arched head and drawbar tunnel in left jamb; similar doorway, now blocked, above and to left. Above and to right blocked window in chamfered surround. Left return of house has C19 window to attic. Rear elevation has lground-and 2 1st-floor shortened sashes in chamfered surrounds. Wall of bastle to left has small blocked window. Interior of house has C18 stair with closed strings, turned balusters and ramped moulded handrail, C18 fireplaces and roof trusses with curved principals. Interior of bastle shows large 1st floor fireplace with chamfered surround and stub of upper cruck roof truss. Bastle roofless at time of survey. (Listed Building Report)

The West Range
The bastle in the west range, c. 7m by 6.5m, has unusually thin walls (0.65-0.8m) for a building of this type, except for the 1.5m thick south wall which contains a very large fireplace at first floor level (cf. Hayrake and Monk). Both doorways are on the east, originally opening on to the yard but now covered by an eighteenth-century outshut added when the bastle was remodelled as a conventional house. The first-floor has original windows on the east and in the centre of the north gable; a timber projecting from the east wall is most easily interpreted as the stub of an upper cruck. Wooley Cottage, adjoining the bastle on the south, is a 'polite' house of two storeys and an attic; its interior remains relatively unaltered, with a good staircase, contemporary fireplaces, doors and cupboards, and an upper-crack, roof. The triangle of buildings at Wooley is without a doubt the most important group of early buildings in Allendale. The 1608 survey lists Nicholas Sheele, tenant of 'Woye' as paying a yearly rent of £1 14s. 8d., the highest for a single tenement in the East Allendale grieveship (N.C.H. 3, 95), showing that the apparent status of the group (compared with other farms in the area) is more than an accident of survival. The farmhouse is clearly the oldest building on the site, and perhaps the only 'pre-bastle' dwelling to survive in the area; although its interior has been heavily modernized, it seems clear that it was a long house in its original form, although modified at a relatively early date. The building probably dates to the second half of the sixteenth century; the three bastle-like structures are all probably of early seventeenth-century date. It is not clear whether there were further buildings linking them; it seems reasonable to believe that the yard was enclosed in some way, perhaps by a wall or palisade. The western part of the north range, and the surprisingly high status 'Wooley Cottage', date from the mid-eighteenth century. (Ryder 1992)

Comments

In the 1608 survey Nicholas Sheele is also recorded as the tenant of a 'water corne mill called the kinge's mill'. This may suggest the Wooley complex had a role as a regional corn store with specific need to be defensible.
See also The Farmhouse and North Range other bastles within this farm complex.