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Mint House is a Grade II*-listed timber-frame building, which stands opposite Pevensey Castle on Pevensey High Street in East Sussex. It has been on the Heritage at Risk Register since 2022, and is currently in extremely poor condition – but the Friends of the Mint House, having secured funding from Historic England, are working to restore the structure and to turn it into the Home of Sussex Folklore.
As part of this initiative, last year Historic England funded dendrochronological dating of samples of wood taken from the building, led by Dr Martin Bridge. The results found that the hall and kitchen ranges all date to the same period, with timber from these areas probably having been felled sometime between 1520 and the early 1530s. It appears that the cross-wing and joining range are of a slightly later date, built using wood that was felled between 1560 and the early 1570s. This means that the kitchen buildings are the oldest-known surviving examples from this period in the county. In addition to the building’s architectural importance, there are inside it a series of nationally important paintings, which have just been surveyed by conservator Dr Andrea Kirkham, in the hope that they can be preserved as part of this project.
Text: Kathryn Krakowka / Images: courtesy of the Friends of the Mint House
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