Sunnybrae

Sunnybrae is a cottage, possibly originally a squatter's cottage, with an attached outshut. It dates from the late 18th or early 19th century and underwent later 19th-century alterations and addition.

The building is constructed from uncoursed local basalt stone with a gabled plain tile roof and an external stone stack with brick shaft. The cottage is oriented north-west to south-east and is built into a bank on ground rising to the north-east, with a single-depth plan and a single-storey outshut (possibly a former cowshed) at the north-west gable end.

The front (south-west) elevation has two bays and one and a half storeys. A large stepped stack with a bread oven on its west side stands to the far right. A 20th-century brick porch at centre-right marks the entrance, flanked by windows with 20th-century metal-framed casements. Two gabled eaves dormers with similar casements light the attic. The outshut on the left has a 20th-century half-glazed door and a window with wooden frame facing the front, with a two-light casement window under a segmental-arched brick lintel in its north-west gable end. The rear elevation has a small ground-floor window with wooden frame.

Internally, the main entrance has a chamfered timber surround, probably of late 19th-century date. The right-hand heated room contains a chamfered axial beam with straight cut stops; a 20th-century fireplace has been inserted into the original inglenook, though the latter may survive behind later plaster. The left-hand room, which is unheated, has a similar chamfered spine beam. A doorway connects through to the outshut, which now contains a bathroom. Two inter-connecting bedrooms on the upper storey are accessed via a timber winder stair from the left-hand room, arranged without a corridor with one room opening into the next and separated by a stone internal wall. The right-hand bedroom retains a simple 19th-century wooden fire surround. Both the cottage and outshut have single purlin rafter roofs.

Historically, on the commons of the southern Clee Hills, farming was increasingly combined from the 16th century onwards with industrial activities such as coal mining and quarrying. Smallholdings and squatters' cottages fringed the moorland, which provided common grazing. Their presence reflects the quarrying and mining opportunities that drew pioneer miner smallholders into the area, who would often build cottages on wasteland paying an annual fee to the landowner. Sunnybrae is shown on the First Edition Ordnance Survey map of 1884 and from its fabric appears to date from the late 18th or early 19th century.