Marking the centuries

It's not many cottages that can plot changes made over foursuccessive centuries, but then Hall Cottage isn't your average home.

This surprisingly spacious building adjoins the memorial hall inHinton Charterhouse, hence its name, and has had quite a role invillage history.

Chris Brammer has lived there for nearly 21 years and hasuncovered all sorts of fascinating details in his time there -literally.

There's the Elizabethan fireplace upstairs, for instance, and theshovel unearthed among the foundations.

"I had that dated by Devizes Museum and was told it was medieval."

From that he deduced that the cottage was built as a much longersingle-storey building by monks attached to Hinton Priory in the1480s.

One hundred years later and it had become the village farmhousewith an upper storey added.

In the 1680s, a kitchen was added at the front. He discovered acoin from the reign of James II in the slots in one of the ceilings.

And then, in the 1780s, a very handsome Georgian sitting room wascreated at the far end of the house, although Chris reckons theactual room existed before that in Elizabethan times. He's alreadyremoved several fireplaces to expose the elegant Georgian one butbelieves there's a larger Elizabethan one behind it.

A robust woodburner sits in the fireplace and there's a prettyGeorgian arched recess on one side.

This room is panelled and it took Chris 18 painstaking years toremove layer after layer of paint before getting back to the wood sothat he could prepare it for his neutral colour scheme.

By the 1880s the farm, as it was then, had become part of HintonHouse Estate and when a much grander farmhouse was built next door,the farm manager lived in Hall Cottage.

And then it became redundant, and the estate decided to give it tothe village.

And it became the Reading Room with a billiard room above.

More recently, part of the cottage was used as kitchens for theMemorial Hall until a new purpose-built extension was planned.

When Chris bought the cottage - "I fell in love with it as soon asI looked through the window" - it hadn't been lived in for more thana year and was "falling down a bit".

Someone had sawed partway through one of the main beams in theroof, so that had to be rectified quickly, and beams across thelovely big sitting room were rotting at one end so that entire sidehad to be brought in four inches.

Rooms upstairs were inter-connected so he moved the staircase inthe oldest, central part of the cottage to create a narrow landing,with bedroom, bathroom and study off it. This also meant creating anew entrance to the main bedroom, the one with the Elizabethanfireplace.

"We discovered a secret passageway that went up to it and it waspacked full of extraordinary things, 18th century show buckles, pigbones and bottles."

And the loft space under the stone roof - it's the only house inthe village still to have this type of covering - was obviously usedfor storing farm equipment. You tend to come out covered with tracesof madder, the red dye used for marking sheep, says Chris.

Part of the cottage's charm is that remnants of its history arestill so evident. The room in the middle of the ground floor has awonderful bowed ceiling and two windows set into five foot deepsills. One of them is very narrow and was covered up when Chris movedin. He believes that it's Elizabethan.

The other one, somewhat larger, has arched frames and could wellhave come from the priory, he feels.

There's an equally deep sill in the kitchen, plenty wide enough totake a hob.

Throughout the exhaustive re-design, Chris has tried to recycle asmuch as possible. Parts of the Victorian staircase he removed havebeen used to construct engaging arched doorways that somehow suit therandom layout of the upstairs.

There are vast aged beams in the second bedroom and the bathroom,and the huge master bedroom has a decided slope to it - in factthere's a one-foot difference between one side and another, saidChris.

The garden at the front is big enough for a table and chairs inone part, a lower area complete with a grotto, and a parking spaceand it's the sort of quirky home that will appeal to people with aninterest in history, who don't want their rooms to have perfect rightangles.