Calways Farmhouse

Calways Farmhouse is a farmhouse of mid to late 16th-century date with a major mid-17th-century improvement, renovated around 1975. It stands in the village of Yarcombe as part of an attractive group of listed buildings.

The building is constructed of local stone and flint rubble, plastered on the front elevation, with stone rubble chimney stacks topped with 19th and 20th-century brick. The main house has a thatch roof, while the outshot has a tile roof.

The house follows a 3-room-and-through-passage plan facing west, built down the hillslope and terraced into it at the north end. The uphill northern room is an unheated inner room, originally probably a buttery. This connects to the hall, which has an axial stack backing onto the passage. The rear passage is now blocked by a 20th-century staircase, replacing an original newel stair that stood in a lobby between the passage and hall. The southern room is a kitchen with a gable-end stack. The original house was floored at both ends, but the hall was open to the roof. In the mid-17th century, the hall was floored over and the lower end was completely rebuilt as a kitchen. The building is 2 storeys with 20th-century service extensions on the right end.

The main front has an irregular 4-window elevation of 20th-century casements containing rectangular leaded panes. Most first-floor windows rise a short distance into the eaves. The passage front doorway is right of centre, containing a 20th-century part-glazed plank door within a contemporary thatch-roofed porch on plain timber posts. The main roof is gable-ended to the right and has a low half-hip to the left.

Internally, the inner room ceiling comprises 20th-century joists. The partition between the inner room and hall has been mostly removed, but the headbeam of the original oak plank-and-muntin screen survives, as do the jambs of a Tudor arch-headed doorway. The doorframe is unusually chamfered on the inner room side. The original hall fireplace is blocked, though its oak lintel is partly exposed. A 17th-century crossbeam in the hall has deep chamfers with step stops. A Tudor arch doorway leads from the hall to the former stair lobby. The top of another similar doorway has been reused as a window frame in the back wall of the hall; it is thought to have come from one end of the passage.

The kitchen at the service end retains mid-17th-century features. Along the lower side of the passage runs an overlapping plank screen containing a doorway with a cranked head. The kitchen has a large stone rubble fireplace with a chamfered oak lintel and an oven doorway in the right cheek. Originally a newel stair rose over the oven housing to the right of the fireplace, but this was removed around 1975 to provide a doorway through to the extension.

The original roof structure survives over the inner room and hall, carried on clean side-pegged jointed cruck trusses. Their collars have been removed as they stood only about 1 metre above the first floor level. The roof over the kitchen is mid-17th-century and is also carried on a clean side-pegged jointed cruck truss, though here the collar is positioned higher.