02 - 12 High Street
Text and image from trail sign
This row of terraced houses are typical of the workers’ cottages built by the estate in the early and mid C19th. No. 10 (now part of no. 12) with its archway was a cart-house with access through a hole in the wall to the shared well at no. 8. [Over the years many estate workers lived in these houses: engine driver, engine fitter, butler, wheelwright, tailors and many agricultural labourers.] In 1851 a tailor lived at no. 10, which explains why, during renovation of the building in the early 1980s, many buttons were found under the floorboards of the room above the cart-house. The rear gardens of the terrace do not respect the house boundaries, having been set to give each family a reasonable piece of land. Likewise, the estate changed the internal design of nos. 15 & 16 by extending a bedroom of no. 15 over the downstairs rooms of no. 16. This was probably done to accommodate a larger family in no. 15 and the arrangement exists today as a ‘flying freehold’.