I've just found this amongst my files, name of farm is asterisked. She is describing the famhouse in 1948 - I don't think it has changed much. It is a listed building so renovations will be controlled.
Edited from JESSICA LOFTHOUSE ‘Three Rivers’ published 1948
There is a path along the lower edge of the trees to a farm equal age, ***********.
It is pleasantly situated, too, standing firmly at the foot of the hill, not far from the dwindling Sabden Brook, among good meadows and pastures. It is well within the limits of the old Pendle Forest, and seeing the date, 1592, over the door we can imagine other callers in the wilder days, neighbours with wonderful and terrifying tales to tell. Very few of the old houses around were free from active victimization by the women who claimed powers of witchcraft. Bullhole, Greenhead, the Laund and Hoarstones are not far away—all connected with the witches.
*********** is the typical Elizabethan hall with its porch, where one can sit in cool shade, and wide windows with mar lights, the sun slanting through carved mullions on to the stone-flagged floor of the original house-place. One window has a few tiny diamond panes of old stained glass. From where Great oak beams and rafters span the room, shaped in days when the valley still had many woods. The original fireplace is there, though a Victorian grate and oven has been built into the open hearth.
In such a house families gathered (as Sir James Kay-Shuttle-worth described in his writings on superstition), grouped round such a fire, telling tales in keeping with wild nights, mid-winter storms. He penned these words:-
"The solitude of life in the moorland farmhouses does not foster the influence of superstitious traditions so much as the wild stormy climate which holds its blustering reign through six months of every year in this region of morass and fog, dark clough and craggy chasm. Night shuts in early. . . . The great sycamores stagger in the blast which rushes from the distant sea. The wind moans through the night like a troubled spirit, shakes the house as though it demanded admittance for the storm, and rushes down the huge chimney (built two centuries ago for the log fires and large hot heap of wood ashes), driving down a cloud of smoke and soot as though by some wicked cantrip the witches careering in the storm would scatter the embers and fire the building."
The Sabden Valley has changed somewhat since Sir James wrote this, and liberal education and social intercourse ", the radio and local 'bus services have all helped the Pendle Forest folk to throw off the thraldom of superstition ". Many old farms stand derelict on the higher slopes, but in the dale are good meadows, and we saw them lit up by the sun and shining after rain.
There is nothing strange about *********** to-day. There are three small children, as bonny as any the house ever bred, whose voices and running steps sound through the house continually, and cheerful washing-day and baking-day bustle comes from the kitchen.
