Bramley And Thimble Cottage

Bramley and Thimble Cottage are two cottages, originally a single house, with origins in the 16th century. The house was refurbished in the early to mid 17th century and rearranged into three cottages in the 18th century, with modernization occurring around 1980. The construction is a combination of plastered walls, stone rubble to first-floor level, and cob above. The stacks are a mix of 19th and 20th-century brick atop cob and stone rubble.

The cottages apparently evolved from a 16th-century three-room-and-through-passage house and have been substantially altered since. In the 18th century, it was divided into three single-room cottages. Thimble (formerly Crosstree) Cottage occupies the former inner room and features a rear lateral stack and a circa 1980 rear kitchen extension. Bramley was formed by uniting the other two cottages around 1980. The unheated service end room of Bramley incorporates the site of the former passage, and the passage doorways are blocked. A lobby entrance now opens to the side of the former hall axial stack, which originally backed onto the passage; this stack is of cob construction. A rear wall in the hall has been breached to create a circa 1980 extension.

Both cottages are two stories high. The front has an irregular fenestration with a total of six ground-floor and three first-floor windows, all 19th and 20th-century casements with glazing bars. The front door to Bramley is left of center and has a 20th-century door with a thatched, semi-conical hood. The windows on either side conceal the doorways to the former cottages and reveal exposed stone jambs; the left window is the original front passage doorway. The entrance to Thimble Cottage is located at the rear of the service outshot and has a 20th-century glass-roofed porch. The main roof is half-hipped at each end.

The interior retains evidence of all building phases, although the original plan remains essentially intact. In Thimble Cottage, a crossbeam was replaced in 1985, and the fireplace has been rebuilt. The roof space is inaccessible, and no trusses are visible. In Bramley, there is no exposed carpentry detail in the former service end room. Within the former hall, the fireplace has been rebuilt with stone rubble, and the lintel is a reused 17th-century oak timber, with a soffit-chamfered edge and scroll-stopped ends. An early to mid 17th-century axial beam across the hall is also soffit-chamfered with double bar-scroll stops. The oldest roof truss, found near the party wall, is a side-pegged jointed cruck truss showing drilled holes indicating it was once a closed truss. Other trusses are 18th-century A-frames with pegged lap-jointed collars and X-apexes. Some purlins display sootting, suggesting they were reused from an earlier 16th-century roof.