Manoir de Franquenies

The manor complex presents a compact, rectangular two-storey house built in brick on a rubble base of schist sandstone, set within a high surrounding wall of brick and the same sandstone. The whole ensemble formerly received a lime whitewash; that coating has been stripped away and the masonry stands exposed. The building’s position lies beside wet meadows and close to the small watercourse known as the Ry Angon.

The principal south frontage has five vertical openings arranged symmetrically. The central opening provides the main stone-framed entrance beneath a shallow segmental arch, and above it sits a rectangular window that lights the entrance. Flanking bays at ground level show slightly cambered lintels while the upper windows are set beneath straight lintels. Each opening is finished with channelled jambs, a carved form of vertical stonework that frames the doors and windows. Anchors fixed into the upper wall record a construction year in the late 1600s; only the central anchors remain and they form an incomplete date fragment reading (1)68(?). Just below the cornice the façade shows many putlog holes where scaffolding once sat.

A steep, hipped roof covered in slate rises above the house, pierced by dormer windows with hipped roofs and served by tall chimney stacks. Flanking the main dwelling are former farm dependencies, traditionally recorded as 17th- or 18th-century stables and a barn; these outbuildings have since been altered and reconfigured from their original arrangements.

On the street side a combined carriage porch and dovecote forms a brick and gritty limestone feature with a small hipped roof. The carriage opening is set between buttresses and framed with moulded jambs and impost blocks, the arch itself of a rounded, basket-handle shape. Four façade anchors decorate this portal, two of which are stylised into a moustache-like form. A heavy double-leaf wooden gate closes the entrance; it contains a smaller wicket door whose handle is shaped like a horseshoe.

Set into the enclosing wall, the small chapel built in 1743 presents a central rectangular niche closed by an iron grille. The niche rests on a reused blue-stone threshold and lintel and is topped by a relieving brick arch. The exterior gable of the chapel is brick, crowned with a stone cross and decorated with three cartouches: a round top panel bearing the Marian monogram, a middle panel carrying the invocation that gives the chapel its name, and a lower rectangular panel containing a chronogram that composes the date 1743. To the left of the niche a white-stone alms box bears an inscription inviting passersby to leave alms and invoking “Our Lady of Fevers and Consolation, pray for us.” The pearwood statue once displayed in the niche, dated to the 11th century, has been removed from the site for precautionary reasons.

Beneath the manor the cellars remain associated with the building’s judicial role, local tradition holding that they served as a place of detention when the seigneurie exercised intermediate and minor justice. Today the property and its fabric survive visibly in their altered state, with exposed masonry, surviving anchors, the chapel inserted in the wall, and reconfigured farm buildings forming the principal archaeological and architectural evidence on the site.