Powder Mill Cottage

Powder Mill Cottage is likely a former cooperage and cottage associated with a gunpowder mill, dating to the mid-18th century and re-roofed in the mid-20th century. It is constructed of uncoursed limestone rubble with thin quoins and dressings to the right-hand two-window section. It has brick gable and ridge stacks and a concrete tile roof.

The building has a single-depth layout, with chimneys at both ends of the long left-hand section and one to the shorter section on the right. It is built across the north gable of Powdermill Farmhouse.

The exterior is two storeys with an eight-window front. It features wooden lintels over closely-spaced windows with 20th-century casements, first-floor wall-plate lintels, and glazed doors at the second window from the left and between the third and fourth windows from the right. The right gable has a large external stack set on a rubble base, with a late-20th-century inserted doorway to its left.

The long east ground-floor room has a large fireplace in its eastern end, under a chamfered beam with an oven to the right. A smaller stack is positioned at the opposite end, faced with later brick. There are heavy chamfered beams, some with filled joist holes, as well as later, smaller joists. A small heated room at the rear has a shallow arched recess in its rear wall. The upper floor contains room divisions from the mid-20th century.

The Littleton gunpowder mill operated from the early 18th century for approximately a century, supplying local mining interests and foreign markets through Bristol. It’s considered the best-surviving gunpowder works from the period in the country. Cooperages were integral to gunpowder production, and the open layout of this structure suggests its original use as such. The close spacing of the windows is similar to that seen in cooperages, including a comparable example at Powdermill Farm in Dartmoor. The right-hand section was likely added later as a dwelling.