Wide Wednesday: The Grange

We dropped Sophie off at school this morning and  headed straight back so that Tess could meet her friends for coffee, while I baked the weekly bread and made a trip to the recycling centre with the garden waste.

This afternoon we took a stroll so that I could make this photo of The Grange, one of the oldest buildings in Street, which is located just behind Clark’s Village shopping centre, for today’s challenge.

The original building on this site dates back to the 1500s when it was part of the Glastonbury Abbey estate. A grange was an outlying farm, often with a tithe barn, that was owned by a monastery or abbey. 

It was largely rebuilt in the mid 1600s when it belonged to Colonel William Strode, a wealthy Somerset land owner and Parliamentarian who fought against the Royalists in the Civil War, including leading his troops in one or two local skirmishes. Come the Restoration, he was imprisoned and died in 1666.

The current facade was redesigned in Victorian times. It currently houses a small exhibition about the Clark family and shoemaking but plans are afoot (as it were) to turn it into a much larger and wide-ranging museum.