Heath Farmhouse

Heath Farmhouse is a late 15th-century open hall house with two crosswings, with a timber-framed chimney inserted into the hall in the late 16th century, the stack later replaced in the 18th or 19th century. A 17th-century parallel kitchen wing was added to the southeast. The house is timber frame with roughcast walls, red brick casing to the ground floor at the front, except for the east wing where the timber framing is exposed below the jetty. It has steep, old red tile roofs. The house is set at the rear of a yard, facing west, with gabled crosswings at each end, and a small parallel kitchen wing beyond a chimney at the rear of the southern crosswing. The west front has a drip board along the top of the ground floor brickwork, an entrance beside the jettied southern wing, a three-light casement window in the centre, and a three-light swept roofed dormer window at the eaves. Windows are small-paned casements. The interior features exposed timber framework. The wings are likely of the same date as the hall. The two-bay north wing has heavy flat joists and a chamfered spine beam with run-out stops. On the upper floor, one room has a cambered tie-beam and two-centred solid braces. The southern wing is of a lower quality and has tension braces and a steeply cambered tie-beam. The hall has three trusses, all moulded, with moulded capitals to the open truss of the clasped-purlin roof. Simple-curved solid braces join the purlins to the principal rafters. The two-bay parallel southeast wing has straight angle braces to the south tie-beam, and straight tension braces to the north end. A reeded moulding is present on the soffit of the inserted floor beam in the hall. This is a late medieval house with unusually good interior details.