The French windows and the culvert behind the house

​The French windows connect the drawing room in the 1902 house extension directly to the garden.

The steps by the French windows

The house is set below the level of the lawn so the French windows in the garden room open onto a narrow area which is paved with red ceramic tiles decorated with a border consisting of a zig-zag line of red and cream tiles between lines of dark grey ones. The retaining wall to the garden is pebble dashed and has Portland stone capping. There are three steps in the centre leading up to the garden and two on each side. The structure is a piece with the Edwardian extension of 1902-3.
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The 1921 air-photo appears to show planting on the lawn edge of the steps retaining wall probably in the curved corners. There were pots on the top of the wall.

The steps by the French windows

The bed by the culvert exit

The bed is shown on the 1921 air-photo. The soil is very shallow and there appears to be some underlying structure other than the culvert arch. This may be the remains of a building or shed which stood in this area in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The culvert behind the house showing the Victorian or Edwardian planting trough and, beyond it, the excavated plant bed with the foundations of an outbuilding visible on the left

The culvert exit

A stream flows through a culvert below the lawn and briefly emerges before passing under the house. There is a concrete planting trough across the culvert exit and this, and the southern side of the channel, have the remains of slag* decoration. The north side is a very stark red brick wall dating from 1990 and there is a similar brick pillar on the south side below the window.
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There is a little bay window on the side of the drawing room which contains a seat - a pleasant place to sit in the summer and enjoy the sound of the stream.

The side of the culvert. This was decorated with pieces of slag* some of which survives

Inside the culvert under the lawn looking upstream away from the house. The low segmental arch is of uncertain date - perhaps late 18th or early 19th century

In the next page we look at

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*metal working slag, possibly from iron smelting