Forge Cottage

Forge Cottage is a house dating from the late 16th century, extended in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It stands on the west side of Hackman's Lane in Purleigh.

The building is timber framed, clad mainly with 18th-century red brick in Flemish bond, with some areas of plaster and weatherboarding. The roof is covered with handmade red clay tiles. The structure presents three bays facing east, with an external stack at the right end now enclosed by an 18th-century one-bay extension. A 19th-century single-storey service extension extends further, with its own end stack. A 20th-century lean-to extension has been added to the rear of the right end. The building is one storey with attics. The ground floor has three 18th or early 19th-century casement windows with crown glass and three 20th-century casements. The first floor has three 20th-century casements set in lean-to dormers. A plain boarded door is positioned in the rear elevation. The roof is a half-hipped gambrel design.

The original building comprised an open hall of two bays with bay posts but without a central tiebeam, with an end chimney, and a parlour bay to the left, also unstoreyed, with a pitched roof. Diamond mortices of an unglazed hall window were reported in the rear wall of the high end bay, though these are no longer visible. Weathering marks on the original roof remain around the stack, approximately 0.60 metre below the ridge of the present gambrel roof.

The timber frame features jowled posts and wallplates with face-halved and bladed scarfs and rafter seatings from the original roof structure. This framing is chamfered with step stops. In the early 17th century, a central binding beam was inserted into the hall, tenoned and double-pegged at both ends and chamfered with lamb's tongue stops. At each end, the bay posts were cut back to form moulded steps below the beam, and chamfered with lamb's tongue stops. Plain joists of vertical section are jointed to the binding beam with soffit tenons with diminished haunches, supported at the right end of the hall on a jointed and pegged frame against the stack—a rare construction. The cambered tiebeam originally spanning between the hall and parlour bay was removed and re-used at a lower level to support the inserted floors.

The parlour bay floor, inserted in the early 17th century, contains plain joists of vertical section with a good series of chisel-cut assembly marks, a framed stair-trap (now blocked) and rebated oak boards. An 18th or 19th-century hearth in the left front corner has its chimney truncated at first-floor level. The main stack consists of two parts of different dates: the earlier section was originally built of small bricks and served the hall only (the hearth much altered in the 20th century), with a second hearth facing right and a larger brick chimney. The roof was wholly rebuilt above wallplate level as a gambrel with a ridge in the 18th century.

Historical records show that land here was recorded as Sayers in a tax roll of 1568 with owner Webb, taxed at 3 pence, and in a survey of Walton's manor in 1584, when it was a copyhold farm of 15 acres owned by Edward Webb. Physical evidence suggests construction probably dates between these two records. Edward Webb's son, also named Edward Webb, is recorded in a rental of 1611. In 1822 Sayers (then reduced to only one acre) was sold to the Congregational Church of Maldon. The Trustees' Book records that the dwelling house was altered to two tenements in 1826 and to three tenements in 1846. The property was sold in 1923 to Frank Brand, a blacksmith, who combined the tenements back into a single house; the present name derives from him.