Cobblestones

This is a late 16th/early 17th century house with shop, extended in the mid/late 17th century and late 18th century. The timber-framed structure has a ground floor mostly underbuilt with sections of 18th and 19th century brick, using both English and Flemish bond patterns. The first floor is clad with painted peg-tile on the front and weatherboarding on the other sides. A brick stack punctuates the facade, and the roof is tiled with pegs.

The house was originally built as a four-room plan, with the front facing the street to the west. The front room served as a shop. The original two-room section dates to the late 16th/early 17th century, although the internal partitions are likely later. A 19th century axial stack heats the second room. A third room was added in the mid/late 17th century, and a fourth in the late 18th century. The house has a cellar under the rear room. Local tradition suggests it was once a baker’s shop, though it is not known how the house was originally heated.

The symmetrical front gable end features a 20th century casement window with glazing bars on the first floor and a late 18th century shopfront on the ground floor. The central doorway has been blocked and replaced with a 20th-century window with glazing bars, but retaining curving bays on either side containing fixed pane windows with glazing bars. The south side has an irregular arrangement of windows, including a late 19th century four-pane sash window and a possibly late 18th century three-light window with rectangular panes of leaded glass. The north side has similarly varied fenestration, with two late 18th-century windows, both containing a single light with diamond panes of ancient leaded glass. This side also features two doorways; one from circa 1948, when the original shop door was blocked, and the other having a 19th-century plank door under a contemporary flat hood. The rear section exhibits exposed framing at ground floor level, nogged with 18th-century brick.

Inside, the original front section has heavy scantling joists and chamfered beams. Exposed framing on the first floor shows large curving tension braces in the end walls. The roof is two bays, carried on a tie-beam truss with clasped side purlins, diminishing principals and small straight windbraces. A separate roof of similar construction with clasped side purlins exists behind it. The more recent rear section has sturdy carpentry, and its two-bay roof is carried on a collared tie-beam truss.

Cobblestones sits within a group of listed buildings on Church Street.