Gordhayes Farmhouse

Gordhayes Farmhouse is a two-storey farmhouse dating from the early to mid-16th century, with successive improvements and alterations through the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries, and modernisation circa 1970. It is constructed of local stone and flint rubble, including sections of cob with some plastered areas, stone rubble chimney stacks topped with 19th-century brick, and a thatch roof.

The house follows a three-room-and-through-passage plan with the main block facing south-east. At the north-east end is an inner room parlour with a gable-end stack, adjoining the hall which has an axial stack backing onto the passage. The left end contains an unheated service room now used as a kitchen, with a one-room dairy block projecting at right angles in front of it.

The building's roof structure reveals that the original house was open to the roof from end to end, divided by low partitions and heated by a single open hearth. The inner room was probably floored first, though this end has since been rebuilt. The hall stack was inserted in the late 16th to early 17th century, and the hall was floored over around the same time or slightly later. A major refurbishment occurred in the early 18th century, when the inner room was lengthened and rebuilt as a parlour. The hall was downgraded to a kitchen and given a large oven, its housing projecting into the passage and probably blocking the front end. The passage screen was moved back into the passage, the service end was rebuilt, and the dairy block was probably added at this time. In the 19th century, the passage was restored when the old oven in the back of the hall fireplace was demolished and a new oven built in the side of the fireplace with its housing projecting outside.

The exterior features an irregular front with circa 1970 iron-framed casements without glazing bars. The passage front doorway is left of centre, alongside the dairy block, containing a 20th-century door with an older sidelight beside it featuring rectangular panes of leaded glass. To the right of the door is the oven projection, with eaves carried down as a hood over the sidelight, door, and oven housing. The main block roof is half-hipped to the left and gable-ended to the right, while the dairy block roof is gable-ended. Iron-framed 20th-century windows appear around the house, except at the rear of the hall where a 17th-century oak four-light window with replacement chamfered mullions survives.

Interior features include a roughly-finished crossbeam in the service end and a passage lower side screen stripped to reveal a plain frame of slender scantling. The hall contains a large fireplace with limestone ashlar jambs and a chamfered oak lintel, with a chamfered crossbeam featuring step stops. The partition between the hall and inner room parlour has been removed, though the headbeam of an oak plank-and-muntin screen remains. The parlour has no exposed beam and features an early 18th-century brick fireplace with a curved back and plain oak lintel, with a smaller version in the chamber above.

The roof is an unusual structure for its date, comprising a series of A-frame trusses with common rafters. The trusses, common rafters, and underside of the original thatch are heavily smoke-blackened from the original open hearth fire. The roof was extended at both ends of the main block in the early 18th century, though most of the original remains. The dairy block roof is carried on 18th-century A-frame trusses.