115 High Street, Lawn Cottage

Very little information had been found about this 17th century house until Gillian Bayliss nee Kenzie provided us with the following:

We lived at The Lawn, High Street, which had originally been called Lawn Cottage when my mother was growing up in the early 1900’s. When I was a child my mother told me that the back of the house was 300 years old and the front much newer because there had been a fire. Where she got that from, I have no idea. However, the back of the house then had flag stones and one had to enter what was our larder by a low door and then step down probably 2 feet into a cold flagstone room. This had once been a dairy.

There were some back stairs which I was never allowed to use because they were unsafe. My mother told me that the stairs led to the servants quarters when her mother was alive. The upstairs was difficult for a child to manage. I had to jump down into a room that had been made into a bathroom!

When we sold the property in the late 1950’s a young doctor and his wife bought it.(At least my mother thought that the doctor’s father did). The Doctor’s surname was Keating. We went back to visit them and the house had been beautifully transformed. There was no extension and the greenhouse to the left of the property looking at the house was still there. That was probably about 1958.

I often wondered what happened to the 4 1/2 acre field at the very back, beyond what we called the back orchard. The front orchard was a picture in the Spring with carpets of daffodils and primroses. My grandfather John Harding had purchased 1,000 daffodil bulbs before the war (39-45).

Dr. Webb garaged his Rolls Royce in one of our barns alongside his maroon Morris Minor.