Standing at the south-west corner of St Peter and St Paul’s churchyard, the Ancient House is a picturesque medieval timber-framed building in this remarkably unspoilt market town. Its elaborate pargeting (raised plaster decoration), so distinctive a form of vernacular decoration in East Anglia, bears the date ‘1473’, and is one of the most celebrated examples of this art in the country. Alec Clifton-Taylor, in The Pattern of English Building, mentions watching two elderly pargeters working on repairs there with a compound of lime and sand, horsehair and horse fat. The house incorporates a handsome moulded timber ceiling in the ground floor chamber and elaborately carved oriel windows there and in the first floor bedroom. Staying here you will have an enviable close-up view of the great wool church and keep time by the chimes of its clock.

A local farmer, Charles W. Byford, acquired the Ancient House in the early 1930s to prevent its removal to the United States and it was subsequently given to Clare Parish Council. The Council invited us to create a Landmark here while they maintain a museum in half of the building, thus together safeguarding the future of the house. Close by is Clare Priory, founded for the Austin Friars in 1248, the earliest house of the order in England, and The Cliftons, a building whose exuberant sixteenth-century brick chimneys are richly decorated with circular shafts, Tudor patterns and star tops. Beyond there is a wealth of little-changed Suffolk villages to discover, with some of the country’s finest Tudor brickwork. 

View our history sheet for this Landmark.  

Sleeps: 2