Pointwell Mill House

House, dating circa 1600, with extensions from around 1700 and the 18th and early 19th centuries. The house is timber framed, with weatherboard and plaster cladding, and a roof of handmade red plain tiles. It originally comprised three bays aligned north-south (with a gable end facing the road), featuring an external stack to the left of the middle bay and a 19th or 20th-century external stack to the left of the rear bay. A two-bay extension was added around 1700, with a further external stack, and is set back from a 19th or 20th-century single-storey extension roofed with red clay pantiles. A small entrance-hall extension, situated in the angle between the front bay of the main range and the external stack, projects slightly forward. The house has two storeys and a two-window front. It has 20th-century casement windows. The front door is located within a trellised gabled porch. Fretted bargeboards decorate the gables of the south (entrance) elevation. The long east elevation of the main range has two 19th-century casements on the ground floor and three on the first floor, while the extension has two 19th-century horizontal sash windows of 12 lights on the first floor, and one similar sash on the ground floor of the west elevation of the main range. The east elevation and main stack are plastered, while the rest of the building is weatherboarded. The house exhibits jowled posts, primary straight bracing with heavy studding, and chamfered axial beams with lamb's tongue stops. The joists (where visible, primarily in the rear bay) are plain and horizontal, secured by secondary nailed heavy clamps. A rebated left wallplate in the rear bay likely held shutters, probably for an unglazed window. Sections of both wallplates have been replaced, one reusing the head or transom of an unglazed window. The roof is a clasped purlin roof with pegged apices, incorporating some smoke-blackened rafters from a medieval hall. A large ground-floor hearth was altered in the early 19th century, featuring a reeded surround with paterae. An inserted first-floor hearth is now blocked, but its mantel beam remains visible. The joists in the rear bays are plain and vertical, jointed to the chamfered axial beam with soffit tenons and diminished haunches, and the posts are unjowled. The property was shown on a 1732 map adjacent to ‘Poyntle Mill’ (at Essex Record Office, D/DU 19/3). The associated water mill ceased operations around 1902, became derelict, and was converted into a dwelling in 1960.