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The Veiled Windows

 

Unknown to most visitors, there is a cellar, which lies under the main entrance to Bishops’ House. On the north and west walls of the cellar are two stone windows, now blocked up and below ground level. The window to the north even has a few small remaining fragments of glass in the frame. There has been much speculation about the purpose of these windows. Are they original to the building or were the stone frames brought here from elsewhere? And if the purpose was to allow ventilation, why was one of them glazed? If we assume that their purpose was to let some light into the cellar then the ground around them on the outside must have been lower at some time, perhaps from the seventeenth century. None of the old photographs of the building show them so we can safely assume that they were blocked up or that the ground level was raised during or before Victorian times.

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