The house seems to have been built in three stages, the back beimg the oldest (about 1700). The rear section contains a brick built oven and has earthen floors. The centre section may have been built 150 years later on two floors and has a large cellar with an underground stream running through it, that runs into a small pit with a submersible pump that empties, on average, three or four times a day (many more times in wet weather!) The large double bay Victorian frontage that you see today was built by the then curate, John Escreet, who retired to Firs House in 1905 when the new Vicar, Rev. Edward Roberts, required the Vicarage. Escreet was a fine wood carver and there is an example of his work, a piece of carved oak, above the inside front door.
During WW2, the house found itself part of the war effort. It is understood that it was used by Bertie Escreet, John’s son, who was the billeting officer for the evacuees who came to the village
More recently, the house was owned by the Elliots. Nellie Halls, who lived in the village all her life, told of visiting the house on many occasions and remembering the large front rooms as very darkly decorated with heavy drapes, flock wallpaper and large dark furniture.
The Yates family moved into Firs House in 1986. A previous occupant, Roger Hartley, who spent 11 years there as a boy, told them that before ‘Watendlath’ was built next door, the area was occupied by a beautiful rose garden in which a large barn was situated. Roger said that he found many local aviation maps concealed in the barn, suggesting a wartime connection.
The house is said to be haunted by a young woman carrying a basket of flowers; Roger, his father and several members of the Yates family all claimed to have seen this apparition: sometimes, during the summer months, a distinct and glorious smell of honeysuckle fills a very specific area of the front hallway, lasting a matter of minutes.
The Yates understood that there is a concealed well somewhere under the present driveway which leads into the cellar under the house and which may account for the stream running in a channel under the cellar floor. Several people also told the Yates of a tunnel running under the fields to Old Wincelow Hall [there is a similar story about the crypt at St Andrews: ed]. Indeed, there is an archway in the cellar wall which is bricked up, but no other evidence of a communicating tunnel.
In the 1970s, the housewas renovated by a local builder who divided the grounds at the point where the stream ran through the garden and built Watendlath on the divided ground, next to Firs Cottage (which in times past served to accommodate the servants for the Firs House).
