No vicar has lived in the Old Vicarage at Methwold for over two hundred years, but this is the least of the puzzles about this intriguing building. Externally, its chief glory is the late fifteenth-century brick gable-end, whose octagonal stack seems a sampler of early Tudor patterns. This gable-end is unique in Norfolk and possibly beyond and, despite its modest village setting, bears comparison with the greatest early East Anglian brickwork such as that of Oxburgh and Layer Marney.

The jettied, timber-framed range behind the gable is also advanced for its day, the stout cruciform spine beams on both floors telling of a building designed to have two storeys from the start. These beams are beautifully moulded and so too are the fireplace surrounds and bressumer. Upstairs acanthus leaves by the hand of a late sixteenth-century craftsman run rampant across stud and plasterwork.

The greatest puzzle is why such a richly decorated house should have been built for the priest of a village on the edge of the fens, famed only for its rabbits – but this need not trouble unduly those who come to take pleasure in its rarity. The Old Vicarage had been condemned for demolition when Monica and Harry Dance came to its rescue in 1964, and they eventually relinquished Manor Farm to Landmark in order to move to Methwold.

The Dances later bequeathed the Old Vicarage to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, of which Monica was the renowned Secretary for many years and from whom we were happy to accept a long lease.

An engaging nineteenth-century vicar of Methwold, the Reverend Denny Gedge, bemoaned the dilapidated state of the Old Vicarage even in his own day (living himself in a ‘neat new vicarage at the other end of the parish’) and wailed, ‘Oh! if some charitable millionaire even now would buy it … its price would be very small.’ We think he would have approved of today’s solution.

View our history sheet for this Landmark

Sleeps: 5