Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

Glebe House, Cheriton WHILE THE church at Cheriton has been justly celebrated for its structiural beauty and happy situation, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the interesting house which overlooks it. Despite alterations and additions, Glebe House still retains a number of its medieval features. It conforms to a typical medieval house plan, consisting of a hall and solar cross-wing. A cellar was subsequently built on to the solar cross-wing to provide additional room for storage and accommodation. The hall, originally and within living memory, open to the roof throughout its length, has now been considerably altered by the intrusion of a second floor and by the construction of two partition walls which divide the house into two separate dwellings. The upper floors of the solar and cellar, however, are original and the massive chamfered oak beams which support them are still a visible testimony to their venerable age. The principal rafters over the hall, pegged at the ridge and braced by slightly curved collar beams, curve into the walls and the chamfers on their undersides are stopped by single nail-head ornaments carved into the wood. The common rafters, purlins and, of course, the slate roofing are modern. From the outside, the most arresting feature of the house is the chimney supported by three corbels which projects buttress-like from the solar wall and terminates in a slender octagonal stack, giving the house a teapot appearance. The technique of the castle-builder, fragmentary examples of whose work are scattered so intensively throughout the peninsula of Gower, clearly influenced the building of Glebe House. The walls over two feet in thickness, the well-worn, stone newel staircase roofed over in rubble which connects the hall with the upper floor of the solar and the projecting chimney bear witness to this. It was once thought that the chimney showed signs of the influence of a Flemish settlement in the area. Such a view, however, has long been discredited. A similar type of chimney is found in Somerset and Lancashire and in other English counties where Flemings are not known to have settled. The type also occurs in a mere robust form in Pembrokeshire-an area noted for its castles. The almost complete absence of decoration in the form of mouldings and carving in wood and stone make the close dating of the present building difficult. The lintels and jambs of most of the windows have either been removed or replastered and give no idea of their original appearance. Again, the rough pointed arches of the doorways connecting the solar wing and cellar with the hall could belong to any period before 1700. An upper date limit for the main building, however, is provided by the general appearance of the window openings in the ground floor of the cellar. These small rectangular windows with a plain chamfer on lintels and jambs and