The Bakehouse (See our experimental firing)

The Bakehouse in January 2001 before the new exhibition.

The Bakehouse is an extension added on the north side of the farmhouse c.1800-1842, about the time that the house was 'Georgianised' and provided with sash windows and a neo-classical door case. A long stone sink beneath the window on the east side of the room is probably an original feature and may have been used for preparing dough. Water was brought into the room from a pump outside the house just to the north-east

A plan of the house made for the owner Frank Cullen in 1914 describes the room as a scullery and shows a copper against the north wall. By this time, the oven was probably little used, probably superseded by a range in the kitchen next door, and the bakehouse had become a washroom.

The oven is a brick dome, oval in plan, measuring 1.6m x 1.1m, and 0.4m high. It has a floor of square clay tiles or pammets. It is sealed with a metal door. In front of and above the door, there is a brick flue which turns through a right angle to join the chimney of the farmhouse kitchen in the adjoining room. The arched cavity below the oven is for the hot ashes raked out from the oven after firing. The exhibition allows access to the oven for the first time with five panels of explanatory text on its use and the old methods of baking bread in a brick oven.

The oven lit with white oak faggots, the smoke going out of the open door

and up the chimney to the main stack.