Lower Berrycourt Farmhouse

Lower Berrycourt Farmhouse is a partly-medieval farmhouse, with significant alterations from the 16th, 17th, and 19th centuries. It is constructed of dressed limestone and rubble stone with a thatched roof and brick stacks. The property comprises a six-bay hall house with an attached 17th-century service wing.

The south-west front is two-storeys high with a four-window arrangement. A gabled 17th-century stone porch stands at the centre, featuring round-arched doorways on either side. The interior planked door is set within a pointed, chamfered opening. The ground floor has three-light and two-light recessed chamfered mullioned casement windows, while the first floor contains two two-light, one single-light, and one three-light recessed chamfered mullioned casements. A straight joint marks the junction between the 17th-century service wing and the earlier 15th-century range. The right return of the service wing exhibits raking buttresses and a coped verge, with a single-light and a two-light recessed chamfered mullioned casement on both ground and first floors. The rear of the wing also incorporates two-light mullioned casements.

The left return displays the front of the medieval range, featuring a 19th-century gabled porch and a 20-pane sash window on the left. Further windows include a two-light mullioned casement with a hoodmould, a three-light mullioned casement, and a blocked doorway indicating the former location of a passage. The first floor has two 12-pane sashes and a two-light mullioned casement. The rear of this range includes a large four-light mullioned casement and a blocked doorway indicating a former screen passage, alongside single and two-light hollow-chamfered mullioned casements representing the solar. The north-east gable has a single hollow-chamfered mullioned casement.

The interior primarily reflects 16th and 17th-century remodelling, with the original medieval roof retained. The 17th-century wing features deeply chamfered beams with stepped stops and an open fireplace with a timber lintel on stone jambs. The present entrance hall, located in the former service end of the hall house, incorporates a blocked pointed, chamfered archway at a low level on the north-west wall, marking the position of a former screen passage. The dining room, once the open hall, contains a 16th-century inserted ceiling with moulded cross beams and a stone fireplace with a depressed moulded arch and a salt cupboard with butterfly hinges to an inserted stack. Two stone Tudor-arched fireplaces are found on the first floor. A newel staircase ascends from the ground floor to the roof space.

The six-bay 15th-century roof retains a deep arched-braced collar truss to the two-bay open hall, with heavily smoke-blackened timbers. Closed trusses have tie beams, collars and upper V struts, with wattle and daub panels. The hall truss and through purlins are chamfered, and some curved windbraces remain.

The farmhouse is locally significant as a fine example of a late medieval hall house, altered in the 16th century when a hall ceiling was inserted and a stack was built at the screen passage end, in the early 17th century when the solar range was remodelled, and in the late 17th century when the service wing was added and a new entrance created. Historically, the property was owned by the Abbess of Shaftesbury until the Dissolution, and subsequently by the Arundells of Wardour until the 1930s.