Quest Cottage

House, dating to around 1600, with extensions from the 18th century and 20th century, and incorporating 19th-century Tudor Revival decorative details. The house is timber-framed, with plastered walls and a roof of handmade red plain tiles. Originally a two-bay range facing northwest, it has a 19th-century external chimney stack to the left and an internal stack behind the ridge in the right bay. An 18th-century two-bay extension adjoins the right side, with an internal stack at its right end. A 19th-century wing lies to the rear left. Modern flat-roofed, two-storey, and single-storey extensions have been added to the rear of the main range. The house is two storeys and has an attic. The front has four 20th-century casement windows on the ground floor, three on the first floor, and one in the attic gable. A 20th-century door is set within a gabled porch formed from a former bracketed 19th-century canopy, with added posts and intricately fretted and pierced bargeboards featuring fleur-de-lis motifs, a carved finial, and a pendant. The 18th-century extension to the right has a gambrel roof running parallel to the front elevation, and a 19th-century feature gable facing the street, decorated with bargeboards, a finial, and a pendant, mirroring that on the porch. An elaborate fretted and pierced eaves board displaying fleur-de-lis designs runs along the left range. Elaborately moulded octagonal shafts are on each chimney stack. Inside the left range, there are jowled posts, chamfered binding beams with lamb's tongue stops, arched braces to the two left tiebeams, which are cambered. The joists, of vertical section with lamb's tongue stops, are jointed to the binding beams with soffit tenons with diminished haunches. Many studs are missing from the right end wall, where two square posts, chamfered to an octagonal shape above with lamb's tongue stops and nailed in place, likely reused from a 17th-century bed, have been inserted. The roof is a clasped purlin structure, largely complete; the left truss reveals that the original range extended further left, behind the service bay of a neighbouring property. The right range has a chamfered transverse beam of vertical section with lamb's tongue stops, possibly inserted, and plain joists of vertical section. A wood-burning hearth is at the right end, with 0.23-metre brickwork jambs, an original mutilated mantel beam, and a covering.