Church Cottage

Church Cottage is a house, originally a late 15th- to early 16th-century building with alterations in the 16th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is constructed of plastered cob walls on rubble footings, with stone and cob stacks topped with 19th-century brick. The roof is thatched. The building has an irregular plan, facing southwest.

The original design appears to have been a 3-room and through-passage plan with a service room at the northwest end. A 16th-century cottage or service block was added to the right of the original cob cross-wall, further extended by one room around 1983. Passage doors have been blocked, and a front door inserted into the former inner room. The small size of the service end and passage may indicate a reduction in size over time. A hall stack backs onto the former passage, and a lateral stack has a bread oven projecting to the rear of the cottage/service block. A cob stair turret to the rear of the hall is now disused. The front has a long six-window façade, primarily with 19th- and 20th-century casements of varying sizes and irregular placement. A 2-light first-floor window is an adaptation of a 17th-century 4-light oak frame with chamfered mullions. Eaves rise over a 1983 half-dormer at the right end, and two adjacent half-dormers to the left, one containing a 19th-century Gothick-style casement with cinquefoil heads and original leaded glass over transom. Most windows have glazing bars. The main door is protected by a late 19th-century gabled porch with a slate roof, glazed sides, and shaped bargeboards.

The interior is well-preserved. Sooted rafters and thatch over the hall and inner room suggest an original house divided by low partitions; the sooting over the inner room is believed to be original, despite fire damage in 1962 to the rooms below. It contains a 2-bay hall roof supported by a side-pegged jointed cruck truss. The hall has a 16th-century upper end jetty with large framing over an oak plank and muntin screen, and a large 16th-century granite fireplace with an oak lintel backing onto the former passage, with remains of a contemporary oak plank and muntin screen, including a flat-arched door frame to the right. A segmental-headed oak doorframe with a studded oak plank door in the rear wall leads from the hall to the former stair turret. The hall has late 16th- to early 17th-century chamfered and stopped spine beams with run-out stops. The cottage/service block has a kitchen fireplace in the rear wall and an axial beam, chamfered with step stops. An end room and a chamber above were converted from an outshot in 1983.