Old Fashioned Quirks in Our Farmhouse

Our farmhouse is old.

We don’t know how old. We think 16th century but we are yet to have this confirmed.

When we started dating, the farmer, (knowing I loved Tudor history) told me Oliver Cromwell had stayed here and that you could still see the holes in one side of the house from where the guns were fired.

He has since told me he is not 100 per cent sure this is true but there are holes on one side of the house so, in this case, I am going to believe it until I am proved wrong.

We do now that people stayed here when the Liverpool to Manchester railway was being built and our attics-where our bedrooms are housed servants.

It is so interesting and, like the land we work on, it is both frightening and marvellous to think of the other people’s footsteps we are treading in and following.

The Mother-In-Law lives in the main part of the house. Our part is the attics (like I said before), an old room where meat used to be hung, an old pantry-converted and extended to become our kitchen and an outdoor toilet which has been redone and is now our downstairs closet and hallway.

When I try to explain to people how it was before, I can never adequately describe it.

Rooms untouched for decades.

It was like walking into a secret garden.

Now it is all freshly plastered and (most) of the woodworm has gone, it is hard to imagine what it was like before but there are a couple of reminders and they actually are quite at home with all of our things.

In the living room-the room that was previously used for meat hanging and storage, there is one chain remaining.

We kept it.

It hangs from a low beam and I love to think about its heritage.

I actually hang a bauble off it at Christmas-much to Hubster’s annoyance because he bangs his head on it every time he walks past.

It is upstairs in the attics though which really grabs my imagination.

The beams.

In the boys’ room, before it was done up, the window had been taken out so it was dark and there was no flooring.

It is in there that the woodworm really went to town. Even now, some of the wood can crumble but, I just think it adds to the charm. Good job really. I think it would be a fruitless task to try and tackle it.

It is Boo’s room where the curiousness lies.

The room had a decorative window-more so than any of the others and it did have flooring and was used to store really old furniture.

All plastered and decorated now, you wouldn’t know the origins of it at all except, again, for the beams.
In this room however, it is not the holes from the woodworm which is the exciting bit. It is the etchings on the beams.

Lines etched onto some. Roman numerals etched on to another.

I have googled the Roman numerals and they didn’t really hold any significance that I could think of.

The thing is, they could have been there before the beam was inserted into the house.

They could have been carved when the house was built-maybe by the builder or the carpenter.

I like to think though that they were carved by someone who lived here. That they had a reason to carve those symbols.

We may never know who did them or why but I love to look up at them and wonder.

There are certainly quite a few quirks here and I absolutely love them.