Penvearne Farmhouse

Farmhouse. Dating from the 17th century, it was remodelled in the 18th century and re-roofed in the 19th century. The building is constructed of shale rubble and cob walls, with timber lintels and some granite. It has a grouted scantle slate roof with brick chimneys over two gable ends and over two cross walls. A half-hipped outshut roof covers the rear wings. The layout is an irregular L-shape, with two parallel, single-room, two-storey service wings at the rear right. The original core is a three-room house from the 17th century on the right, with a two-room house added around the early 19th century to the left (one room now incorporated into the main house), and a further two-room house added later in the 18th century in front of the original right-hand room, set at a right angle to the original house. The original plan likely included a three-room and through-passage design with a hall and inner room to the left and a lower room to the right, with an integral service wing behind both the hall and lower room, creating five rooms in total. It is two storeys high. The south front presents a slightly irregular facade with five windows overall; the gable end of a projecting wing is on the right, the two-window front of the 18th-century house is on the left, and the three-window front of the original 17th-century house is in the middle. This three-window section, which was remodelled in the 18th century and had its eaves raised in the 19th century, represents the higher end (hall and inner room) of the original house, while the lower end is obscured by the wing. A circa early 20th century glass porch sits in front of the doorway between the ground floor left and middle windows. The middle window, likely the position of an 18th-century doorway, has an eight-pane horned sash. The ground floor windows to the left and right are 18th-century fixed lights with intersecting traceried heads, featuring wide glazing bars and some original crown glass. The left-hand window has an internal ovolo moulding, while the right-hand window is chamfered. A straight joint is visible between the ground floor middle and right-hand windows. First-floor windows on the front include sixteen-pane hornless sashes dating to the early 19th century, flanking the gable of the porch, and a 20th-century window near the angle with the wing. The rear elevation retains good cob texture on the pair of wings, which were re-roofed under a single roof in the 19th century. Each wing originally had a ground and first-floor window, likely identical to the surviving two-light oak mullioned window with blocked lights on the first floor of the left wing. The ground floor left-hand window is now a doorway, and later windows are in slightly altered openings on the right-hand wing. A back doorway, probably originally positioned between the wings, is now blocked. The interior generally features 19th or 20th-century carpentry and joinery, with the exception of the remains of a large hearth containing a chamfered oak lintel and chamfered, stop-chamfered granite jamb visible in the east wall of the rear wing. Despite later alterations in the 18th and 19th centuries, it is a fascinating house, notable for its unusual layout with a pair of identical service wings, and for the surviving 17th-century oak mullioned window at the rear and the two 18th-century windows with Gothic tracery to the front, possibly unique in Cornwall.