Two strange doors


Today Mark and Michelle were removing an old floor to ceiling cupboard and some wall plaster in what will become an en-suite shower room. The room is really quite small at about 2 x 4 metres but the strange thing is that there are two narrow doorways in it. This little room is in what was once a large room dating from the 1500's that was divided into three separate rooms quite some time back. Essentially

two stud walls were put in to divide the large room. I think that the original division was done some time between the 1500 & 1700's and then altered again at a later date. One small door is built into one of the stud walls and the other into a thick stone wall. As you will see from the photos to say that the doors are narrow would be an understatement, you pretty much have to go through them sideways. I think that the higher of the two is original to the time when it was all one room and could have been a main door into the room. I have reached this conclusion because it has a proper stone frame that could be from the 1500's. This will become a very nice shelving niche when we repoint the stone work. The 
other little door looks to have been built into the stud wall when it was put in to divide the room. It just has a simple wooden frame and as you can see from the pics it has been bricked up at some point. I suspect it was bricked up in the mid 1700's when this wing of the chateau was extensively enlarged and modernised. In this refurb the largest of the three rooms was decorated in the regency style with plaster ceiling and walls. At this point the doorway was bricked up and plastered over. It was strange though because the actual door was never removed and remained hidden inside the cupboard!

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