Upper Ground Floor

Comments on Upper Ground Floor

Breakfast Room

This area is not mentioned in any of these inventories. A floor plan for Viscount Tyrconnel (above left), shows it with a passageway through to the double storey kitchen past an inner room. That room is labelled 'larder' on a 1st Baron Brownlow plan after Wyatt's 1770s changes (above right}. Prior to the 1800s makeover, this area was firmly in the servants' domain.

Westwood R. (1987) had access to the Brownlow archive before its transfer to the Lincolnshire Archives where it remains incompletely catalogued. She states that the 1737 Inventory lists the equipment in the kitchen as being on the “second floor” (the first floor being the rustic, or the basement). We cannot confirm this from our perusal of the 1737 inventory. But it is likely that items such as the great gun (1737, possibly for shooting pheasant in the nearby pheasant yard) and 20 chamber Potts (1754) listed under the Kitchen would be stored away from the food preparation areas.

The Kitchen appears with the lower ground floor/basement inventories in 1698 and 1737.

Drawing Rooms

The drawing or withdrawing room does not appear in Gervais Markham's 1613 treatise on the English gentleman's house. Parlours acted as sitting areas for entertainment. In the C17 drawing rooms appeared en suite with parlours for uncertain reasons. In the C18 the drawing room became the withdrawal area for women after dinner, while the men remained in the dining room. The 1698 drawing rooms were for more intimate entertainment with 8 to 10 chairs each compared to 24 in the Parlour. After 1737 the one near the Chapel, the Crimson Room has become the State Bedroom on the plan.