Courthope Farm

Courthope Farm is a farmhouse dating from the late 16th century, with alterations made in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is constructed with a timber frame and features a facade of red and grey brick laid in Flemish bond, topped with a plain tile roof. The building consists of three timber-framed bays and a stack bay, standing two storeys high with an attic and a hipped roof. A large brick ridge stack rises into the front slope of the roof towards the right end, and there is a dormer on the right hip. The windows are irregularly arranged, with four two-light casements—three to the left and one to the right of the stack. There is a ribbed door located under the second first-floor window from the left, and a blocked door with a segmental head at the right end. A brick lean-to is attached to the right gable end, and another brick lean-to was added in 1987 to the left. At the rear, there is a rendered single-storey addition from the 19th century, also with a hipped plain tile roof.

Inside, the left ground-floor room has renewed joists but shows evidence of an underbuilt jetty at the rear. There is a fragment of a four-centred-arched doorhead with hollow spandrels and roll-moulding at the front of the partition between the left and central rooms. The central ground-floor room features a chamfered axial beam and a chamfered beam across the stack, both adorned with fleur-de-lys chamfer stops, and a shaped bracket under the left end of the axial beam. The joists in this room are unchamfered. A brick fireplace has a herringbone brick back and a four-centred-arched roll-moulded bressumer with hollow spandrels carved with leaf spears. The right ground-floor room includes a beam across the stack and a chamfered axial beam, along with a brick fireplace that has a wooden bressumer and a bread oven extending to the front wall. The left first-floor room features a cambered axial tie-beam with short solid-spandrel braces, and there is a central tension-braced stud in the right gable end. The exposed framing is complemented by a clasped-purlin roof with diminishing principal rafters and deep collars.