Thursday 21 November 2013

Hide or run.

At the north end of Ufton Court, on the first floor, a bedroom has a garderobe next to the fireplace. Under the garderobe there is a hide.
The trap door is not the original, but the hide drops down to the basement of the house.
Looking down into the hide you can see where it passes through one floor level and on into the next. It is possible that this hide was in fact a means of entry or exit from the house, through the basement, and perhaps through a tunnel, and so out into the gardens. If so, this would have provided a very quick and discrete means of entry or escape. It isn't possible now to determine whether this was the case because the outer wall of that part of the house has undergone extensive renewal, even to its support with the building of an external brick buttress.

2 comments:

Lynda said...

A priest's hide?

Fr Richard Aladics said...

Yes, and maybe also a means of entry and exit to the house via a discrete passage to the gardens of the house.