Great Auncke Manor And Auncke Cottage

Great Auncke Manor and Auncke Cottage

A small country mansion, now divided into two separate dwellings. Built in the late 17th century and renovated in the early 20th century, the building is constructed in Flemish bond local handmade brick with some burnt headers, and stone rubble footings visible at the rear. The chimneystack shafts have been partly rebuilt with 20th-century brick. The roof is tiled in red, though it was originally thatched.

The mansion is built on level ground with a four-room main block featuring a central through-passage facing south. Axial stacks sit between the two rooms on either side of the passage. At each end, two-room rear blocks project at right angles, each incorporating a stairwell between the main block and rear block rooms. The right (east) rear block has an axial stack and is believed to be a kitchen wing. The left rear wing is a service block, with the principal rooms located in the main block. This is a single-phase building, now divided into two occupations along the passage: Great Auncke Manor occupies the left (west) part and uses the passage, while Auncke Cottage occupies the right part.

The building rises two storeys with attics in the roofspace. The exterior originally had a symmetrical nine-window front, now containing 20th-century casements with glazing bars that replicate the form of the original mullion-and-transom windows they replaced. These windows have flat arches above of rubbed gauged brick. Three of the first-floor windows are now blind, and the ground-floor window second from the left end has been converted to a doorway with a late 19th to early 20th-century plank door and overlight. The central passage doorway features a segmental arch head and contains a 19th-century six-panel door with an overlight. Directly above this doorway and to its left is a bell with a small gabled canopy. A flat plat band crosses the front at first-floor level. The roof is hipped at each end with sprocketed eaves. Most windows on the ends and rear have low elliptical arches and contain 20th-century casements similar to those on the front. Few windows open onto the rear courtyard, but the west wing (the Manor) has two original windows at ground-floor level: a three-light and a four-light oak-framed window with ovolo-moulded mullions. Between them is a doorway with an original ovolo-moulded oak frame containing an original studded plank two-panel door. Both wings have hipped roofs.

The interior of Great Auncke Manor, which was available for inspection, has been thoroughly modernized in the late 19th to early 20th century, with most joinery detail from that period. However, the original staircase survives: a large dogleg stair with square newel posts, closed string, and moulded flat handrail, though the turned balusters appear to be 20th-century copies. All fireplaces feature late 19th to early 20th-century chimneypieces and grates, and there are no plaster cornices. The original layout is well-preserved, making the house structurally intact. Auncke Cottage is reported to have undergone similar modernization and is probably very similar in character, with a comparable staircase and some said to be original panelling. The roof is carried on original tie-beam trusses; if the trusses have collars, these are very high and hidden by the ceiling.

Great Auncke Manor and Auncke Cottage represent an elegant late 17th-century brick mansion, one of a number of significant early Devon brick buildings in the area. According to Edwin S. Chalk in his 1920–21 study of early brick buildings in Devon and Cornwall, the house was originally thatched and is unfinished, the builder having reportedly died at the gate. The window mullions and transoms are of stone, and putlog holes in the walls had been recently filled at the time of Chalk's documentation.