Early Architecture In The Lake District

Late sixteenth and seventeenth century Large Houses had two main storeys and often an attic and sometimes a basement as well. They were often of a plain rectangular plan shape but with a boldly projecting multi-storey porch. Many rooms were heated and this improvement in comfort was advertised by tall cylindrical stone chimney stacks, the simple northern counterpart to the highly decorated brick chimney stacks of southern England. Large mullioned and transomed windows graced the main elevations and lit rooms decorated with panelling and plasterwork. Most of these houses were one room deep, elongated or rambling, but a small handful were compact and two rooms deep.

With the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, traditional plans gave way to symmetrical layouts based on a front door located about the middle of a more or less stylish elevation. A group of houses in West Cumberland, represented by Moresby Hall, presented elaborately rusticated masonry elevations to visitors approaching the front door. More commonly, as at the Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, the rendered walling of the main elevation was picked out in stone dressings.

The Large Houses of the Lake District are charming and picturesque in appearance, but, apart from such ambitious houses as Levens Hall, Sizergh Castle or Askham Hall, they are not in the front ranks of the nation's vernacular architecture. The stone of the heart of the Lake District did not lend itself to architectural embellishment. Original window patterns have been lost in eighteenth and nineteenth century alterations. Impressive spaces have been cut up to make rooms more suitable for the life of the farmer and his family. Nevertheless the Large Houses are an important part of the vernacular architectural scene both in themselves and in the influence they had on design of smaller houses.

In the Lake District, the Small House of the yeoman or tenant farmers and their social equals emerges fully developed in plan and constructed of permanent materials about the middle of the seventeenth century. At the moment we know very little about their predecessors but the fully mature state of the seventeeth century plans suggests that a change of building material or construction method rather than a new departure in planning was indicated in the seventeenth century. The reasons for this housing revolution or Great Rebuilding are as obscure here as in the rest of the country though here, as elsewhere, accumulation of capital through advantageous economic conditions presumably was a prerequisite. It may be that social and assumed legal changes following the Union of the Crowns in 1603, and the confirmation of customary tenure with right of inheritance in 1625, led to circumstances in which such a Great Rebuilding could be contemplated and implemented after the days of the Civil War and Commonwealth.