Ham Cottage

Ham Cottage is a small cottage dating primarily to the early 16th century, with improvements made in the 17th century. It occupies part of a larger original house, likely divided into smaller dwellings in the late 18th or early 19th century. The walls are plastered cob on stone rubble footings, with stone rubble and brick stacks topped with 20th-century brick. The thatched roof is continuous with the adjoining properties.

The cottage has a two-room plan, facing south and forming the former inner room end of what was originally a three- or four-room house with a through-passage. The hall, passage, and service room to the left (east) are now part of The Old Bakery, while a 19th-century extension on the right (west) forms part of The Sheiling. Each room has a stack in the end party walls, all rebuilt in the 20th century. A secondary central partition divides the left (eastern) room. The front has an irregular two-window arrangement of 19th and 20th-century casements; ground-floor windows have glazing bars, and first-floor windows contain 20th-century leaded glass panes. A late 19th- or early 20th-century four-panel door is slightly left of centre, smaller than the original.

The interior is notable for an early 16th-century oak plank-and-muntin screen separating the rooms, with chamfered muntins and cut diagonal stops. The original rear doorway, a two-centred arch, has been cut in half and a post inserted to carry axial beams to either side. These beams are likely late 17th or early 18th century; the left beam has a roughly-finished soffit chamfer, and the right is soffit-chamfered with run-out stops. The original roof remains, featuring a face-pegged jointed cruck truss in the left-end wall and another over the screen, both filled with large framing dating to the late 16th or early 17th century. The roof space is inaccessible. The 17th-century plaster is backed onto water reeds. The right (western) party wall is cob and forms the end wall of the original house. While the nature of the original layout remains open to interpretation, it likely involved an open roof space with possible smoke-blackening from a former hearth.