Mystery window

[xMTx]

Hi all,

This window has been fitted and the frame made up to fill the gap, very poorly!

I have noticed the notches cut in the beam above and there would appear to be a missing upright timber in the middle of the aperture.

Would anybody have any idea on what this would have looked like originally and maybe how we could reinstate it to restore it?

The building age is unknown as yet.

Many thanks

 

[Cubist]

When I first saw this my first thought was that the window frame was a Victorian travesty committed by a previous owner. Closer study though suggests its a much later, and perhaps 20th Century, addition. Setting aside the abomination of a faux Victorian window frame set within an outer frame that is in turn set within the timbers of the house frame - all of which, in my opinion, should be removed, not least because it is an active threat to the much older timbers.

The purpose of that notch/rebate in the underside and middle of the upper wall plate beam is, and will likely remain, an enigma. No timber framer worth his/her salt would cut a rebate on the underside of a beam. Typically, a horizontal timber, say a bressummer, running at right angles to a beam such as that one, would be set ‘above’ the beam and set into it with perhaps a half-dovetail. The rebate though would not extend to the full width of the beam to then appear outdoors. I therefore suspect that either that beam has been ‘turned’ at some point thus revealing the rebate on its new underside or, more likely, it was scavenged and re-purposed from some other building.