Visitors will have a once-a-year opportunity in September to go into the finest of Winchelsea’s 51 vaulted medieval cellars. Hidden under the ruins of the so-called Blackfriars Barn, on the edge of the Cricket Field and next to the A259, this very special cellar is usually opened by its owner, the National Trust, only for Heritage Open Days. This year, Heritage Open Days in Winchelsea will take place over the weekend of September 10-11. There will be free guided tours of the cellars at 11am and 2pm on Saturday September 10 and other tours on Sunday. Just turn up.
Winchelsea has more medieval cellars (or “undercrofts” to use the technical term) than anywhere else in the country, with the exception of the cities of Bristol, Norwich and Southampton. But Blackfriars Barn cellar is unlike any of the others. It has three chambers, a fireplace in one of the chambers and a wall covered with medieval ship graffiti scratched into the plaster. The only other example of such graffiti is under the Tudor House in Southampton.
The tours on September 10 will be conducted by the Winchelsea Archaeological Society, which helped clear the cellars and surveyed the ship graffiti. It will also be displaying a model of the building, reconstructed for the society on the basis of some skillful archaeological detective work.
It seems clear that the building and cellars of Blackfriars Barn had some public function, perhaps, a guild hall. Mysteriously, it had been abandoned by the 1360s. Between the middle of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, the cellar was used as the town dump. When opened up in the 1970s, it was full of broken glass and crockery (in fact, it held the largest assemblage of such material in the South East). WAS volunteers have been sorting and cataloguing the crockery retrieved from the cellar for several years.
After Heritage Open Days, the cellar will be closed to allow bats to roost over the winter.
WAS will also be conducting one of its regular guided tours of the other cellars under Winchelsea on Saturday September 10, starting from the Town Well in Castle Street at 2pm.
Photos: Richard Comotto, Matt Champion