Hoop Farmhouse Including Linhay Adjoining To North

Hoop Farmhouse including Linhay

A farmhouse with adjoining linhay, situated on high ground with extensive views. The main house dates from the early 16th century with major improvements in the later 16th and 17th centuries, some 19th-century modernisation, and partial renovation circa 1980. The linhay probably dates from the 13th century.

The farmhouse is constructed of plastered cob on stone rubble footings, with stone rubble stacks topped with 19th and 20th-century brick. The roof is thatch. It is 2 storeys with a 20th-century lean-to conservatory on the right (east) end and secondary lean-to outshots to rear.

The house follows a long 4-room-and-through-passage plan facing south-south-west, built down a gentle hillslope. At the uphill (west) end is an inner room kitchen with a gable-end stack. Next to it is the hall with a projecting rear lateral stack. To the right (east) of the passage are 2 unheated rooms: the first, probably a dairy or buttery, and the end room which was formerly a service room or cellar but was refurbished and converted to a parlour circa 1980, with a 2-storey outshot added at that time.

The early 16th-century house was originally an open hall house. The inner room was floored early on, with a jettied chamber inserted into the open hall. The rest of the house was open to the roof, divided by low partitions and heated by an open hearth fire. The hall chimneystack was probably inserted in the mid or late 16th century. The hall itself was floored over in the early to mid 17th century, at which point the original framed jetty crosswall was demolished and replaced with a new full-height crosswall. The inner room kitchen fireplace appears to be 18th or 19th century.

The exterior shows an irregular 4-window front of 19th and 20th-century casements with glazing bars. The passage front doorway, roughly central, contains a 20th-century glazed door. A secondary doorway to the right leads into the inner room kitchen and contains a late 19th to early 20th-century plank door. The roof is gable-ended to the left and hipped to the right.

Interior: The historic layout is well-preserved. The inner room kitchen has an axial beam unstopped with deep chamfers, probably 17th century and associated with the rearrangement when the hall was floored over. The kitchen fireplace is large with brick jambs and a plain oak lintel. It is partly blocked, with an oven housing projecting outside behind it. The hall is large and contains a 17th-century crossbeam richly moulded with semi-pyramid stops. The fireplace here is blocked. No carpentry details are visible in the passage or former dairy/buttery. The beams of the lower end parlour and its roof structure were replaced circa 1980. The rest of the roof is original, carried on side-pegged jointed cruck trusses of large scantling, with a hip cruck at the inner room end. The original jetty crosswall was a closed truss. The roof structure over the inner room chamber is clean. The remainder of the roof structure, including common rafter couples and the underside of surviving original thatch, is heavily smoke-blackened from the original open hearth fire. There is evidence of a demolished smoke louvre over the hall.

The Linhay: A probably 13th-century linhay projects at right angles to the rear of the inner room kitchen. It is built of cob on stone rubble footings with a corrugated iron roof, facing west onto the farm courtyard. It is open-fronted with 5 bays (Alcock's Type T1). The roughly-finished crossbeams carrying the tallet/hayloft floor are tusk-tenoned into full-height front posts standing on stone pads. The posts support the outer principals of A-frame trusses with pegged lap-jointed collars.

Hoop is an attractive and well-preserved multi-phase Devon farmhouse, marvellously situated on high ground with extensive views.