Bramble Cottage And Middle Tencery

Bramble Cottage and Middle Tencery are two cottages, originally a single farmhouse, dating to the early 17th century. The building was renovated in the mid to late 19th century and further subdivided around 1980. The construction utilises local stone rubble with some 19th-century brick dressings, stone rubble stacks incorporating 19th and 20th-century brick chimneyshafts (one of which is plastered), and a thatched roof.

The cottages are situated down a hillslope and face southwest. Middle Tencery, the cottage on the northwest side, originally had a two-room layout. The larger right room had an axial stack shared with Bramble Cottage. Around 1980, the partition between these two rooms was removed, creating a single room. The entrance to this room is at the rear. Bramble Cottage, situated on the downhill side, features a through-passage adjacent to Middle Tencery and a single room with a projecting gable-end stack. Originally, the farmhouse comprised three rooms and a through-passage, which was later subdivided to form the two cottages. Middle Tencery now occupies the former hall and unheated inner room, while Bramble Cottage occupies the passage and former service-end kitchen.

The exterior has an irregular three-window front with 20th-century casement windows, some with glazing bars; the two ground-floor windows to the left have flat brick arches above. A 20th-century plank door is located in the passage front doorway (to Bramble Cottage), which is right of centre. The roof is gable-ended.

Internally, both cottages retain early 17th-century fireplaces and carpentry details. In Middle Tencery, an oak plank-and-muntin screen was removed from between the rooms, leaving the headbeam. An early 17th-century oak window frame with ovolo-moulded mullions has been incorporated below the remaining headbeam. A chamfered hall crossbeam is present, featuring unusual triple-step stops. The fireplace here is constructed from sandstone ashlar with an oak lintel having rounded corners and an ogee-fillet moulded surround. In Bramble Cottage, the former kitchen retains similar but plainer details, with a chamfered axial beam and step stops and a fireplace resembling the hall fireplace but with a chamfered oak lintel. The roof structure consists of 19th-century A-frame trusses with bolted lap-jointed collars. Only the roofspace over Bramble Cottage was inspected at the time of the survey.

Bramble Cottage and Middle Tencery form part of a group of attractive traditional thatched-roofed houses near the Church of St Nicholas.