Building record 2416/0/397 - Possible former fodder store

Formerly associated with the Talbot Inn

{1} This building stands in the far SW of the 'L'-shaped yard, its walls forming the common boundary with a bungalow, formerly built for school staff in the 1970's, and now sold off.
This building is built of coursed local oolitic limestone, averaging 500mm thick and 2.9m to the eaves, and is roofed with graded and bedded Collyweston stone slate. It is approximately square in plan and has two surviving ventilation shafts. An internal timber lintel on the south wall suggests that there might have been another here, although this is not exactly central and the stonework shows no signs of a built-up opening. This south wall has developed a significant lean out of the vertical, due to the depth of the lower pathway to the bungalow. The east wall has a large full height opening with doupble doors, dating from the time it was converted to a cart house or garage, no doubt replacing the original access.

The ventilated openings are set with their sills 1.7m high from the present floor, suggesting that the building was built as a farm or grain store. The wall coursing, with the occaisonal deep course of squared rubble, is characteristic of the later 17th or early 18th centuries.

The buildings original purpose is not precisely established, for it has been much altered. In normal circumstances it would have been assumed it had been constructed as a farm store, for straw or unthreshed grain, but its unusual square plan and the association with the inn, suggest it may have been used a store for fodder for horses, using standard agricultural building methods, a use that declined in the 19th and early twentieth centuries with the arrival of self-powered transport.

<1> Woodfield P.; Tingle M., 2003, An Archaeological Desk-based Assessment and Trenching of land at the rear of the Talbot Hotel, Oundle, P. 14 & 15 (Report). SNN103145.

Record last edited

Oct 3 2016 11:59AM