The Museum’s cottage is an amalgam of two buildings (buildings 3 and 11 Map ) because no house was sufficiently well preserved to allow for reconstruction on its own evidence.  Both of these buildings contained two rooms, an inner room with a large domed oven and an outer room with a hearth cut into the chalk floor.  There has always been some debate about their function: although they have been interpreted as living houses the possibility exists that they were free standing kitchens or bakehouses. The structure of the buildings also remains conjectural.  When Holden excavated the site he found the remains of timber post-holes below the flint walls in building 3 and concluded from this that a 12th century timber framed building was rebuilt with flint in the 13th century.  The Museum’s cottage was therefore built with flint walls to a height that seemed to be consistent with the amount of tumbled flint that was discovered.  However, the possibility exists that the timber frame was not replaced but was simply underpinned with a flint footing when the wooden post-holes rotted.  If this was the case the infill could either have been flint or wattle and daub.  Alternatively, a timber frame could have been encased in flint walls.