Page 9

Wednesday, 02 March 2005

The Almonry Museum (Page 9)

The Building ...

The kitchen seems to have been detached. Many monastic kitchens were detached: that arrangement gave protection against both the spread of fire and the intrusion of smells. The fire-place of the present 'almonry' kitchen, is 11 ft. 6 ins. (3.5 m.) across and traversed by a massive mantel-tree, seems too large to have been intended for purely domestic use. The original roof of the kitchen has gone but the present west wall, some 3 ft. (l m.) thick, is perhaps contemporary with the chimney. On the outside the west wall has toward its north end a slightly-projecting mass of irregular masonry which, if the present building is the former almonry, would indicate the site of the barton gate said in the 1540s to adjoin the almonry on the rest.

The main hall with its two wings and kitchen was probably the only part of the present building standing at the suppression of the monastery in 1540. The rooms that it comprised may have been those listed in the 1557 inventory of the former almonry but we cannot be certain.

Important alterations to the medieval building were made at intervals until the 17^th or 18^th centuries. First, the space between the north wing and the kitchen  was closed by the insertion of a single building linking the two. Of that building all that remains is part of the south wall of stone; it is not known whether there was more than one storey.  The surviving south wall seems to have been pierced, where it met the north wing, by a wide doorway of which the stop-chamfered west jamb remains. The doorway formerly gave access to the outside of the building but by 1820 framed an interior passage leading to the east end of the building and is now visible only inside that passage. Another  doorway, similarly stop-chamfered and perhaps contemporary, was 'inserted at right angles to the first to give access from the outside of the building to the ground floor of the 14^th-century hall. That doorway, too, was incorporated by 1820 into the interior passage and its remains are visible only inside. In the south wall of the linking building a little farther west from the doorway is a window of two lights with four-centred arches. Farther west are traces of another wide doorway blocked before 1835. Farther west from that was a third wide doorway, in use in 1845 with a stone lintel forming a four-centred arch; by 1884 the lintel had been removed and the doorway partly blocked to make the present window. Farther west is yet another doorway, originally wider; it existed in 1835 and is still in use.