From the original description - A muddy lane leads eastward to Brewer Street, where there are two picturesque but rather ruinous cottages of early seventeenth-century date, and the fine timber-framed farmhouse which I have drawn ; this is now, and has been for many years, in the occupation of the King family. The building appears to be of the fifteenth century, and is little altered in the front shown ; the two side gables joined by the roof of what had been the centre hall are characteristics of its period ; probably it was built as a yeoman's farmhouse many old manor houses are no larger, but this is much too small for the type of lords of the manor who have held Blechingley since the Conquest. Perhaps owing to its name Court Lodge, it is sometimes written of and described as the porter's lodge belonging to the vanished manor house destroyed by the Earl of Peterborough about 1677; that is quite a mistake; all that remains of that lodge will be found at Place Farm, a little distance to the north. Investigation there is calculated to make an antiquary sad ; this appears to have been a big arched gateway of the type existing at St. james's Palace ; the portion remaining was the entrance for pedestrians, a flat arched doorway showing at front and back the brickwork is very fine. The interior has all been gutted out and incorporated in a featureless eighteenth-century farmhouse, the old side gate, about six feet wide, being found too large for a house door, has been bricked up in a lop-sided fashion, eighteen inches on one side and six inches on the other, the shoulder of the arch being cut away to receive the modern square door frame. The result is so appalling that one wonders how anyone can endure to live in the house and go out and in, with- out pulling the doorway out, and, at least, putting it near the centre ; at the back of the house and extending to the wood known as the kitchen copse, foundations are said to exist in every direction over a large area. This manor when held by Richard de Tonbridge was over twenty miles in circuit ; it descended to the Glares, Earls of Gloucester. Earl Gilbert was killed at Bannockburn, and left no issue, and the inheritance was divided among his three sisters.