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Bodychen

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NPRN15585
Map ReferenceSH37NE
Grid ReferenceSH3889478995
Unitary (Local) AuthorityIsle of Anglesey
Old CountyAnglesey
CommunityBodffordd
Type Of SiteCOUNTRY HOUSE
PeriodMedieval
Description
A greatly ruined fourteenth or fifteenth century block, part of the mansion of a late fifteenth century sheriff of Anglesey. The building was largely intact in the later nineteenth century and was used as a barn. A description was published in 1871 and the remains of the mansion are depicted on the OS County series 1st edition (Anglesey XII.12 1888). It was a two storey building, 15.5m by 8.4m, set on the south-west side of a rectangular walled court or garden, 30m north-east to south-west by 20m. The building had been truncated on the south-east where there was a modern (barn) gable end. It was continued in a lower range, possibly added, on the north-west.

The principal apartment (or apartments) was on the upper storey. Its symmetrical layout counts against its having been a hall. It was entered from the court by a double doorway, possibly reached from a towered porch, of which the base of a spiral stair remains. Away from the court it was lit by three fourteenth century style single light cusped windows. There was a similar window high in the north-west gable with blocked double doors below. In 1937 there were traces of a partition in surviving plaster.
The ground floor is likely to have had opposed central barn doorways, although two of the windows were considered to be fifteenth century in 1937. The court was entered from the north-east. In 1888 the ruins of a 15m by 5.0m building stood within the northern end of the north-west wall.

Sources: Wynn Williams in Archaeologia Cambrensis 4th series II (1871), 238-42
RCAHM Anglesey Inventory (1937), 20

John Wiles, RCAHMW, 18 July 2007