Yard ranges attached to rear of Severn Arms

Cadw's description

Location

Prominent location in village centre with long facade to main road.

History

Built 1840 in local Gothic style, a refounding on a new site of an older village inn which had established itself as an important staging post on the London to Aberystwyth turnpike and coach road. Named after the owner and local squire J Cheesement Severn. It advertised itself throughout the C19 as a "Commercial Inn, Posting House and Family Hotel" with large livery stables and traps, wagonettes and carriages etc for hire, particularly for travellers to the burgeoning town of Llandrindod Wells. It was also of considerable important in the local community life providing premises for Petty Sessions, rent audits, tithe dinners, political meetings and elections, assemblies, balls and the meetings and feasts of all the prominent Radnorshire societies.

Exterior

Rendered with painted black "plinth", slate roofs. Three-storey, H-plan main block with two-storey projecting porch, long two-storey range adjoins on left side with covered way through to stable yard. Principal elevations have gabled fronts with decorative pierced bargeboards. Fine set of original small-paned, iron-framed windows. Lower windows have hooped-top glazing bars and flat heads under hood moulds, upper windows have arched heads and intersecting tracery. Two projecting stacks to each side of main block with rendered brick uppers. Further tall rendered stack serving former coach house to left of covered way. Chamfered stone arch opening to porch, door to former Assembly Rooms in left hand block under small-paned overlight and hood mould. Two flat-roofed modern extensions to the rear.

Yard ranges of outbuildings: Good quality attached ranges of stables/coach houses and other outbuildings arranged around a cobbled yard. Rubble stone, painted to yard side, dressed quoins and arched window heads. Slate/tin roofs. Small-paned, iron-framed windows with tracery heads, good quality boarded doors and chamfered door frames, some blocked openings evident. Stables retain original stalling and cobbled floor.

Interior

Some alterations and modernisation but much period detailing of a simple style survives. Four-panel doors, dog-leg stairs with turned newel and stick balusters, exposed beams and joists.

Reason for designation

Largely unaltered, full-scale coaching inn of historical importance to locality.