Town Farmhouse

Town Farmhouse

A farmhouse built in the early to mid 16th century and subsequently improved during the late 16th and 17th centuries, with a mid-17th-century kitchen wing added. The house underwent comprehensive refurbishment in the mid to late 19th century. It is constructed of plastered cob on stone rubble footings, with cob and stone rubble chimney stacks topped with 19th-century brick, and a thatched roof.

The house follows a T-plan, with the main block facing south-south-east down a gentle hillslope. At the uphill (west) end is an inner room parlour with a gable-end stack. The hall contains an axial stack backing onto the passage. On the other side of the passage is a lower end parlour with a gable-end stack. A two-room rear block projects at right angles behind the hall, comprising a kitchen with a gable-end stack behind an unheated dairy. A stair turret occupies the angle between the two wings alongside the passage rear doorway. The stair was enlarged during the 19th century at the expense of the hall space.

The original early to mid-16th-century house was likely an open hall house heated by an open hearth fire. Flooring and chimney stacks were progressively inserted between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries. The lower end room was refurbished as a parlour in the late 16th to early 17th century, whilst the rear kitchen block dates from the mid-17th century. The inner room parlour may be a 19th-century creation. Much of the 16th and 17th-century fabric is now hidden behind 19th-century plaster, and the roof structure over the main block was substantially renewed in the 19th century.

The house is two storeys high. The exterior presents a regular though asymmetrical four-window front of 19th-century casements with glazing bars. The passage front doorway is left of centre, containing a 19th-century four-panel door with patterned glass and a contemporary gabled porch. The roof is gable-ended. The rear block retains a couple of 17th-century oak-framed windows on the west side near the junction with the main block: a late 17th-century ground floor window of five lights with flat-faced mullions (inside the lintel is propped by a timber spoke from an old wagon wheel), and a mid-17th-century first floor window of four lights with ovolo-moulded mullions.

Internally, most features result from the 19th-century modernisation, though the plan and exposed timbers suggest the early house survives substantially intact. No carpentry is exposed in the hall and inner room, and the fireplaces are blocked, although a farmer reported exposure of an oak plank-and-muntin screen during replastering work between the hall and inner room, with another suspected along the lower side of the passage. The lower end parlour has a late 16th to early 17th-century crossbeam with deep hollow chamfers and pyramid stops; its fireplace is blocked. The main block roof structure is mostly 19th-century, though some smoke-blackened timbers from the early to mid-16th-century roof are reused, and a clean collarless side-pegged jointed cruck survives over the lower end parlour, probably dating from the late 16th to early 17th century. The rear block is mid-17th-century, with the dairy featuring a plain chamfered crossbeam and the kitchen a chamfered and step-stopped crossbeam. The large kitchen fireplace is partly blocked and lined with 19th-century brick, but its chamfered oak lintel is exposed and continues over a cupboard to the right which was originally a walk-in curing chamber. The original 17th-century roof remains, carried on A-frame trusses with pegged dovetail-shaped lap-jointed collars. The joinery throughout is 19th-century.

This is an attractive multi-phase Devon farmhouse. Care should be taken during modernisation work to avoid disturbing 16th or 17th-century features, though the mid to late 19th-century modernisation represents an important phase in the house's development and should be respected.