The Mill Cottage Including Attached Wall to East Around Garage

This is a house, originally a coach house with a harness room above and a coachman’s cottage, dating back to deeds of 1769. It was altered in the early 19th century and extended in the 1920s. The road-facing part is constructed of flint with flint inlays and brick dressings, while the rest is brick, partially painted, and covered by a hipped slate roof with brick chimneys. The building stands end-on to the road, with the former coach house at the end and the cottage behind. A prominent feature is a full-height flint end wall with brick dressings and a blocked round-headed carriage arch, featuring an early 20th-century window. A curved wall attached to this terminates in a brick pier where horses were shod. The principal elevation of the cottage sits behind a high brick wall built of bricks from the bottom of kilns. The wall is crenellated with a pattern of projecting headers, triangular buttresses, and a curved arch with a wooden door leading to the front of the house. The house itself is two storeys high with five windows. The brickwork is in a Sussex bond. Fenestration is irregular, including an original 18th-century Lumley Mill casement window on the first floor to the right. Other windows are early 20th-century casements. The rear elevation has two half-hipped gabled ranges: the southernmost from the early 19th century in diaper brickwork, and an adjoining extension from the 1920s in a similar style. A single-storey lean-to is located on the north side. Inside the former coach house, wooden beams remain. The cottage retains late 18th-century six-panelled doors, several cast-iron firegrates, plank panelling, a plank door, and a stick staircase. Originally the coach house and coachman’s cottage for Lumley Mill, the picturesque flintwork was designed to be viewed from the mill house. Local tradition suggests the ornamental crenellated wall may have been built by French prisoners of war during the Napoleonic Wars.