Trees Cottage Walnut Tree Cottage

House, now divided into 2 houses. Built around 1600, extended in the 18th century and again in the 20th century. Timber-framed with plaster render, roofed with handmade and machine-made red clay tiles.

The main front elevation faces north-west and contains 4 bays with an axial stack in the second bay from the left end. The building originally had a lobby entrance plan, though this entrance is now blocked. A fifth bay was added to the right in the 18th century with an axial stack at the junction. Behind the left end stands a 19th-century weatherboarded building of 2 storeys forming a parallel range with a central stack, incorporated into Trees Cottage. A single-storey ancillary range extends beyond this, and a 19th-century outshut is attached to the rear with a catslide roof and a cement-rendered, truncated external stack. A 20th-century single-storey extension was built in front of and to the left of the left end as a café, now incorporated into Trees Cottage. The building is 2 storeys throughout.

Walnut Tree Cottage comprises the ground floor to the right of the middle main stack and the 3 right bays on the first floor. Trees Cottage occupies the remainder to the left. Most windows are 20th-century casements, with three exceptions: three 18th-century 3-light windows on the first-floor front to the right of Walnut Tree Cottage, each with one wrought-iron casement, and one 18th-century fixed light of 12 rectangular leaded panes with original saddle bars, positioned above the café extension in Walnut Tree Cottage. All doors are 20th-century. The front elevation shows 20th-century pargeting and a renewed coved eaves cornice. Two gabled dormers rise from the rear catslide roof. Walnut Tree Cottage retains handmade tiles while Trees Cottage is roofed with machine-made tiles. The timber frame features jowled posts, heavy studding with primary straight bracing, and cambered tie-beams.

Inside Walnut Tree Cottage, the wide ground-floor hearth to the right of the main stack has a chamfered mantel beam with lamb's tongue stops. The floor structure in this bay is original, featuring a chamfered axial beam with unusual convex stops and plain joists of horizontal section. The initials EBM are inscribed in dirt in front of the hearth. A studded partition between this room and the original service room has been removed. Four diamond mortices for a former unglazed window survive at the rear of the service room, of a type appropriate for a dairy, though all other windows would originally have been glazed at this date. The floor structure of the service-room bay was rebuilt in the late 17th century with a chamfered axial beam with long lamb's tongue stops and plain joists of vertical section. The hearth to the left of the right stack has been rebricked in the 20th century and now contains a working cast-iron kitchen range, with a 20th-century grate to the right. The right ground-floor room has a chamfered transverse beam with convex stops and plastered joists. A plain boarded and ledged pine door connects this room with the original service room and probably dates from the 18th-century extension. On the first floor, two down braces to the rear storey posts have been severed to form a corridor. The wallplates show face-halved and bladed scarfs.

Trees Cottage has been much altered on the ground floor. It retains an original chamfered axial beam with convex stops and plain joists of vertical section. Most of the studding in the front wall is replaced. Hearths on both ground and first floors have been rebuilt, the latter in early 17th-century style.

The tithe map and award of 1846, and the First Edition Ordnance Survey map of 1873, both show this building as having been divided into 4 cottages at those dates.