We don’t know a great deal about the history of our cottage. It seems it was built around the 1830s, and this room, with its large fireplace may have been some kind of workshop. The window was added in the 1980s after the place had been condemned, and then pretty much rebuilt. Originally, the back of the house was butted against the field bank – without footings or a proper floor. The privy was at the top of the bank beside the field, and to reach it you had go out of the front door, round the house and up the garden.
Back then, too, the house was basically a barn, the upstairs subdivided into two rooms with thin boards, and downstairs probably one open space. The owners who did the restoration work turned it into a two up, two down, and added a small upstairs bathroom. The next owners built on another room up and down, and installed the spiral staircase which featured in an earlier post. When we moved in ten years ago, we turned the new downstairs room, which hadn’t been used for any particular purpose, into the kitchen. The heart of the home of course. Which reminds me – I’d better scoot back there. I left some stock cooking on the stove about an hour ago.
Tish Farrell 