Rose Cottage

Rose Cottage, Whimple Church Street

A pair of cottages created by dividing a former farmhouse. The building dates from the early to mid 16th century with major improvements in the later 16th and 17th centuries, and was modernised in 1976.

The structure is built of plastered cob, with some sections lacking stone rubble footings. The south end wall was rebuilt in the 20th century in brick. There are three chimney stacks: the hall stack is timber-framed, the kitchen stack is cob, and the third is stone rubble or brick; all now have 20th-century plastered brick chimneyshafts. The roof is slate, replacing earlier thatch. The building is two storeys with secondary outshots to the rear.

The two cottages are set back from the road, facing west-northwest. Each has a two-room plan, with No 1 to the north and No 2 to the south. This layout derives from the original four-room-and-through-passage plan. No 1 occupies the former passage and lower end rooms, including the original kitchen/bakehouse with a projecting rear lateral stack containing a smoking chamber. No 2 occupies the former hall and inner room.

The original house had a three-room-and-through-passage plan with a mid 17th-century kitchen/bakehouse extension to the north. The hall appears to have been open to the roof originally but was floored over in the late 16th or early 17th century. The hall stack is thought to be an original feature.

The exterior has an irregular five-window front with 19th and 20th-century casements with glazing bars. The front doorway to No 1 is at the rear of the left end and contains a late 19th-century six-panel door behind a contemporary gabled porch with wavy bargeboards. The front doorway to No 2 contains 20th-century French windows flanked by modern buttresses. At first-floor level, there is an old stucco oval plaque painted in the 20th century with "Rose Cottage, 1660". The roof is gable-ended.

Interior features in No 2 include an exposed hall crossbeam, chamfered with cut diagonal stops. A full-height cob crosswall separates the former service room and kitchen/bakehouse. The kitchen/bakehouse has crossbeams and half-beams chamfered with scroll stops. The rear fireplace is stone rubble and cob with a chamfered oak lintel with a scroll stop to the right only, and contains a large brick oven on the right side. The oak lintel originally extended further left across a large alcove, which was a walk-in smoking chamber later revealed during the 1976 renovation to have heavy sooting and a flue into the main stack.

The roof over the kitchen/bakehouse section is a single-bay structure carried on a side-pegged jointed cruck with a pegged dovetail-shaped lap-jointed collar. This bay is smoke-blackened. The original roof over the rest of the house is carried on side-pegged jointed cruck trusses. There is no evidence the kitchen/bakehouse roof is earlier than the stack itself; smoke apparently leaked into the roof from the stack or smoking chamber.