Thursday 13 February 2014

Flower's cottage. 187

This old cottage is still standing, it has been stood empty now for over sixty years, its tiled roof has been kept in reasonable condition, it is half timbered with two rooms down and two up along with a lean too back kitchen round the back.

Flower's cottage.
One interesting feature is, it had its own well in the small stone structure in front of the house, seen in the picture left of the front door.

 It has a wide inglenook fire place beneath the only chimney and to one side in the cheeks of the inglenook is a built in bread oven. A fire of dry sticks and logs would be lit in that oven, and the smoke from it would go up the chimney within the inglenook, when hot enough the ashes would be raked out and bread and other items for cooking would be place in, the very hot bricks and tiles that form the floor and dome of the oven remained hot for quite q few hours. 

The last person to live here was Reg Flower and his family, they moved out in the 1950's into one of the new ten council houses that had just been built. Reg worked on Cooksland Hall farm for Eric Bennion, he was also a very good carpenter, and at weekends he turned barber, cutting the hair of most of the  farm men of the village.