Carminowe Farmhouse

Carminowe Farmhouse is a farmhouse built around 1860. It features shale rubble brought to course, with a dressed granite plinth, quoins, sills, jambstones, lintels, and porch. The roof is mostly covered with asbestos slate and has brick chimneys with cornices over the gable ends. The building has an L-shaped plan that includes an integral rear service wing at right angles to the rear, as well as a single-storey outhouse earth closet with a hipped scantle slate roof at the rear left.

The front range consists of a parlour on the left and a wider living room/parlour on the right, with a passage between leading to a stair hall and another passage within the wing that leads to a large pantry, which is ventilated both internally and externally, and to the back kitchen that features the principal fireplace. There is a back door into this passage from the rear courtyard. The farmhouse is two storeys high and has a regular four-window east front, with the entrance doorway located under the second window from the left on the first floor. The original six-panel door is set within a shallow dressed granite open-fronted porch, which has rectangular monolith columns on plinths topped with a simple entablature. The original twelve-pane hornless sash windows are intact.

The other elevations of the farmhouse, like the front, remain unaltered since it was built and retain their original windows and doors. Notably, there is a reused late medieval trefoil-headed window in the gable end of the service wing on the west side. Inside, the farmhouse retains all its original carpentry and joinery, including six-panel doors and an open-well open-string stick-baluster staircase with a mahogany handrail that is scrolled over the newel post. The passages and service wing have stone flagged floors.

Historically, Carminowe was an important manor from the 13th century, and many medieval fragments from the original house still survive. This farmhouse is remarkably complete and unaltered, and it is associated with a fine group of contemporary planned farm buildings.