Barley Hall

The timber frame of Barley Hall leans toward the street at a sharp, precarious angle, a remnant of fifteenth-century construction hidden between newer brick buildings. Once the home of the Priors of Nostell, the house spent centuries partitioned into small apartments, its medieval roof buried beneath layers of plaster and lath. Workers restoring the site in the nineteen eighties peeled away those walls to reveal the Great Hall, complete with its original oak beams still blackened by soot from an open hearth.