Rugmer Hill Cottages

The property comprises a pair of houses, originally a single house, dating to the early to mid 17th century, with alterations in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is timber framed and clad in tile hanging on both floors, with a plain tile roof. The house has a roughly symmetrical, central-entry plan of three timber-framed bays, with the central bay being narrower. It is two storeys high with a garret, and sits on a ragstone plinth. The roof is half-hipped to the left and gabled to the right. A projecting brick gable end stack is located on the left, and a large, projecting red brick stack with asymmetrical offsets, grey brick diaper work, and a truncated filleted flue, is situated on the right gable end. The windows are irregular in their arrangement, with three casements set well below the eaves; two are three-light and one is two-light. A panelled door is set within a brick lean-to to the left, serving No. 1, and a ribbed door with a hipped and bracketed plain tile hood serves No. 2. A 17th or later rear lean-to is attached to the right, constructed of brick in English bond, with a brick plinth and an integral rear brick stack, to which the lean-to is gabled. A less projecting mid-20th century brick lean-to extends across the rest of the rear elevation. Internally, some timber framing is exposed, including a chamfered cross beam to the right ground-floor room and a chamfered axial beam to the left. There is a chamfered plank-and-muntin partition between the right room and the entrance hall. A doorway with chamfered jambs and a pegged dropped head is positioned towards the front of this partition; the jambs extend below a cut cill-beam to the base of the ragstone plinth, possibly an original arrangement. A similar doorway is found on a plain wall opposite. The entrance hall bay is divided axially towards the centre by a pair of doorways similar to that in the partition, with boarded infilling above the heads, and with jambs chamfered to the rear side and rebated for doors to the front side. The left doorway stands at the base of a winder staircase that rises from the ground floor to the attic in the rear half of the central bay. An adjacent right doorway opens onto a passage leading to a similar back doorway. The first-floor landing also has similar doorways to the right and left, the right-hand doorway featuring a double quirked bead moulding. Each first-floor room has a chamfered axial beam. The attic landing has a moulded handrail with riven latticework. Dropped tie-beams are present. The roof structure features no truss over the left-central principal posts, and a closed truss with an interrupted tie-beam, doorway, and vertical queen struts to the collars, over the right-central posts. A blocked inglenook fireplace is located in the right ground-floor room, while a 19th-century brick fireplace is in the left room. The rear lean-to contains an inglenook fireplace with a bread oven and wooden bressumer.