Lower East Coombe

Lower East Coombe is a house, formerly a farmhouse, dating from around the late 15th century or early 16th century. It was floored in the late 16th century or early 17th century and has been extended at the lower end in the 19th century and truncated at the higher end in the 20th century. The building features rendered and painted cob walls and a wheat-reed thatched roof, which is hipped to the left and has a truncated gable end to the right. The layout consists of a three-room-and-through-passage plan, originally with an open hall and open lower and higher ends, likely divided by low screens. The inner room and a small part of the hall were demolished in the 20th century, and the lower end was extended by one room in the 19th century.

There is a projecting stone lateral stack with a round oven on the front of the hall and a lateral brick stack at the rear of the lower end. The house is two storeys high with an irregular three-window south-east front. To the left of the chimney breast is the original doorway, which has a 20th-century boarded door. Above this, on the first floor, is a late 19th-century, three-light casement window, similar to the other first-floor windows. There is a large 12-pane window to the left of the doorway and a two-light casement window at the far left. A 20th-century garage adjoins the gable end on the right.

Inside, the roof over the hall features two smoke-blackened jointed cruck trusses with morticed apices and morticed cranked collars. The trusses are trenched for purlins and cut for a diagonal ridge piece. Although the rafters and purlins over the hall have been removed, the roof over the lower end remains complete and entirely smoke-blackened. The lower end truss appears to be intact and smoke-blackened, and between this and the truss at the lower end of the hall, the purlins, ridge piece, and rafters survive, including the original thatch, all of which are smoke-blackened. A photograph taken during the demolition of the higher end shows that the roof at this end was also smoke-blackened, indicating that the entire length of the house was originally open to the roof. The hall features a splayed late 16th-century or early 17th-century lateral fireplace with ovolo-moulded volcanic jambs and a similarly moulded timber lintel, along with a later bread oven. There are inserted late 16th-century or early 17th-century cross beams in the hall with step stops, and a plank and muntin oak screen separates the hall from the passage.