Higher Houndaller Farmhouse

Higher Houndaller Farmhouse is a farmhouse likely dating back to the 16th century, with significant alterations in the late 16th and 17th centuries, and modernisations in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. The walls are mainly plastered cob on stone rubble footings, with stone rubble stacks topped with 20th-century brick, and an interlocking tile roof, slate to the workshop end, formerly thatched.

The original layout was a 3-room-and-through-passage house, later expanded to a 5-room-and-through-passage plan facing west-northwest. A room at the north end, originally a dairy, was converted to a garage in the 20th century. The original inner room, the parlour, has a former gable-end stack now positioned axially and backing onto the dairy/garage. The hall features a projecting front lateral stack, with the hall and parlour extending to the front of this stack. The kitchen at the service end also has a former gable-end stack, now axial, and backing onto a later workshop.

The house’s initial development is difficult to trace, as the main roof was replaced, and likely raised, in the late 17th or early 18th century. It appears to have begun as an open hall house, possibly warmed by an open hearth. A fireplace was inserted into the hall in the mid-to-late 16th century, and the hall was floored in the late 16th to early 17th century. The kitchen was substantially rebuilt or refurbished in the mid-17th century. The hall and parlour fronts were extended in the late 17th to early 18th century, with a corresponding raising of the walls and new roof construction, and the additional rooms at both ends were likely added at this time. The rear passage doorway was blocked during the 20th century. The house has two storeys throughout.

The exterior displays an irregular 1:2:2 window arrangement with 19th and 20th-century replacement casements containing rectangular panes of leaded glass. The front passage doorway is set to the left of centre and contains an 18th or 19th-century solid doorframe with a flat top and rounded corners, and a wide studded plank door. A monopitch hood is a 20th-century addition. The roof is gable-ended and steps down from the main block to the workshop.

The interior is largely the result of 19th and 20th-century modernisation, but surviving carpentry details indicate 17th-century work, and suggest potentially earlier elements are concealed behind later plasterwork. Existing fireplaces are blocked by 19th and 20th-century grates. A crossbeam in the service end kitchen exhibits a soffit-chamfered profile with scroll stops. The hall has an 8-panel intersecting beam ceiling with richly-moulded timbers, which stops short of the front wall, indicating it predates the hall bay. No beams are visible in the inner room. The roof is inaccessible, but the scantling of the base of the A-frame trusses indicates a late 17th to early 18th-century construction. The additional rooms feature plain carpentry. The property is first mentioned in the 12th-century Canonsleigh cartulary.