Browns Cottages

A pair of cottages, originally possibly two houses or a house with a service wing, dating from the late 15th or early 16th century, with remodelling occurring in the 16th-17th and 20th centuries. The walls are rendered cob, with a dry slate roof featuring gable ends. A brick chimney stands over the left-hand gable and a tall brick shaft is positioned externally, to the front wall to the right of the middle. The main range appears to have been truncated to the right. The irregular north-west front has six windows; five 12-pane, two-light casements are on the first floor. The ground floor contains a 20th-century three-light casement to the left, a doorway with a 20th-century top-glazed door and a similarly-styled open gabled hood on wooden brackets, and a 20th-century three-light casement to the right of the chimney breast, along with a top-glazed four-pane door to the right. The wing’s north-east front displays three ground-floor windows alternating with wide doorways featuring old planked doors. The windows are likely 17th-century oak, with chamfered mullions and some surviving diagonally set bars, but are without glazing. A first-floor doorway is positioned above the left-hand window. The roof is monopitch, with 20th-century corrugated iron sloping down to the rear.

The interior of the main range reveals a smoke-blackened jointed cruck oak roof structure, with morticed, cambered collars visible within the roof space on the right. The left end was only partially inspected, but a morticed apex of a truss is visible, unsmoked. The hall features a lateral fireplace with dressed volcanic stone jambs and an oak lintel, all with ovolo-moulding, likely inserted in the late 16th century. Wide, chamfered and stopped cross beams are present in the middle room, and an axial beam is found in the far-left room at the lower end; these are also likely from the late 16th century. A cross beam on the far right, at a slightly lower level, exhibits a wide chamfer and a stepped and scrolled tongue stop, suggesting an earlier date. The interior of the wing has a cross beam with a wide chamfer and similar stop in the lower room, with the end of the beam forked as grown. The gable-end fireplace in this room has similar stops on the lintel and includes an oven with an arched doorway. A large curved recess to the right of the fireplace may have been for a staircase. The second room contains an axial beam and original joists. The upper room was not inspected. A 20th-century roof structure is present.