Rays / Ray Farmhouse

Description

This information is taken from the statutory List as it was in 2001 and may not be up to date.

INGATESTONE AND FRYERNING TQ6599 HIGH STREET, Ingatestone 723-1/14/399 (East side (off)) 29/12/52 Rays (Formerly Listed as: BRENTWOOD CHELMSFORD ROAD, Ingatestone Rays) II Formerly known as: Ray Farmhouse. House. Early C17 altered and extended in C19 and C20.

Timber-framed, plastered and weatherboarded, roofed with handmade and machine-made red clay tiles. 3 bays facing W with an axial stack in the middle bay, forming a lobby-entrance plan. C17/C18 wing to rear of middle bay, with external stack at end, and catslide extension to left. Minor C20 single-storey extensions to rear and right of rear wing. Early C19 cross-wing to left of main range, extending forwards, with internal stack in left side. 2 storeys and attic. Ground floor, splayed bay of C20 casements, and 2 early C19 casements. First floor, group of 8+8+8+8 lights, the outer 2 being casements, the inner fixed, and 2 casements, all early C19. Early C19 half-glazed door with Gothic tracery in gabled porch. The left elevation has on each floor one early C19 casement. This elevation and the rear gable of the cross-wing are weatherboarded. The right elevation of the rear wing has on the ground floor one early C19 sash of 4+8 lights. The rear elevation of the main range, to left of the rear extensions, has on the ground floor a reused C17 wrought-iron casement with 30 small rectangular panes, early glass and leading, mounted on its side as a fixed light. Grouped diagonal shafts. INTERIOR: unjowled posts, heavy studding, primary straight bracing, face-halved and bladed scarf in front wallplate. The right ground-floor room has an axial beam with early C18 ovolo-moulded plaster, and an early C19 grey marble fireplace with moulded jambs and paterae, in a blocked larger hearth. The left ground-floor room has a chamfered axial beam which has been severed and jointed to an C18 transverse beam to form a stair, although the present stair is later. Large wood-burning hearth, the front jamb rebuilt, the interior relined. The roof has been raised about 0.90m in the C18, originally only one storey and attics. The right first-floor room has an early C19 cast-iron grate with pilasters in low relief, and curved splays. In the left first-floor room of the main range is a C17 3-plank door to a closet in front of the stack. In the attic the base of a diagonal shaft is visible, covered when the roof was raised. In the left side of the rear wing, above a door, is a C17/C18 borrowed light of 9+9+9 small leaded panes. HISTORICAL NOTE: Ray's Farm was among the lands in Fryerning granted by Lady Dorothea Wadham to endow Wadham College, Oxford, and it is extensively documented there to c1920. Maps of 1741 and 1745 show it as a copyhold farm of 100 acres, and the latter gives an elevational view captioned 'The West Front of Ray Farm House'. It has a central door, 2 ground-floor windows to the left, one to the right, and 3 on the first floor, a diamond-shaped central stack, and a lean-to to left in the position of the present cross-wing. Of the 2 windows to left of the door the left one is depicted as smaller than all the others. This is now blocked, probably by the post introduced when the stair was built in its present position; the window above the door, to a small closet, is also blocked.

Examination of the frame within this closet would establish whether the walls were raised to their present height before or after 1745; it is concealed internally now.



Listing NGR: TQ6558799878

Content

This is part of the Series: IOE01/0432 IOE Records taken by Colleen Cole; within the Collection: IOE01 Images Of England

Rights

© Mrs Colleen Cole. Source: Historic England Archive

This photograph was taken for the Images of England project