The single feature in this report is a late 12thc round-headed doorway, reset in a boundary wall at Owston Hall which is today a hotel and a club house. The area outside the wall is rough woodland with a public footpath leading from Owston to Skellow.

The boundary wall is on the N side of the grounds of the Hall and the 12thc doorway's former exterior faces the private grounds, while its interior faces the woodland.

There is circumstantial evidence that the doorway was brought to this site from the manorial chapel at Thorpe-in-Balne (see separate report). The chapel at Thorpe was a part of the moated manorial complex created c. 1185-1200 by the De Newmarsh/Du Puiset family (Tomson 1996, 32-34), situated to the to the N of the chapel. As a consequence of the layout, the two doorways were in the N wall of the chapel.

In 1775, Mrs Mary Davies-Cooke from nearby Owston purchased Thorpe-in-Balne from the Duke of Ancaster. The Davies-Cooke family was still in ownership of Thorpe-in-Balne at the time of the watercolour included in this report (Doncaster Art Gallery reserve collection, DONMG 143.41), which is attributed to Rowland Hibbard and dated 8^th April 1829 (Tomson 1996, 7-8; Hunter 1828, 217-8).

In 1864, Joseph Denby controlled Thorpe, although he did not inherit it until 1882. Tomson (1996, 39) states that “the nave door appears to have been salvaged and taken to Owston Hall for re-erection as [a] garden feature in 1866” following the collapse of the nave and parts of chancel the previous year.

The doorway was brought to my attention by Simon Tomson of Pontefract and District Archaeological Society who had recorded the Thorpe-in-Balne manorial site for the South Yorkshire Archaeological Service in the 1990s (Tomson 1996).

The round-headed doorway is stylistically one of the latest seen in YW. The height of the course containing the integral impost-capital-ring is 0.285m, which is more than the average Romanesque course in this region, typically c. 0.22m. In the arch of the second order, the blank stopping and the hollow moulding in the voussoir above the impost may be compared to a similar feature of the archway of the N porch at Selby Abbey. The inner aspect of the doorway is unusual for Romanesque work, at least in this region, in that the jambs are slightly splayed, widening towards the interior of the nave.