Higher North Coombe Farmhouse

Higher North Coombe Farmhouse is a farmhouse dating from around the late 16th century to early 17th century, possibly remodeled from an earlier house and extended likely in the 18th and 19th centuries. The building features rendered and painted cob walls and has dry slate roofs with gable ends. There is a brick chimney over an external breast with an oven projection on the left (west) gable end, an axial brick chimney towards the right, and a rear lateral brick chimney. The main east-west range is built into the hillside to the east and was probably originally designed with a three-room and through-passage plan. It has been extended with a rear wing in the 18th century and an outshut at the rear (west), which may be a remodeling of an earlier wing. There was further extension in the 18th century or earlier with a dairy to the east and an adjoining cartshed.

The farmhouse is two stories tall with an irregular four-window south front, all featuring 20th-century three-light casements. The ground floor includes a widened window on the left, a six-panel top-glazed door in a possible original doorway, another widened window, and a doorway with 20th-century French windows within a lean-to open porch. This porch has side walls acting as buttresses, which were formerly a window position, and there is a window between further buttresses leading to the dairy in a former door position. The rear wing contains lintels made from re-used timber from a circa 16th-century ruined house located approximately 20 meters to the southwest, which originally featured jointed crucks. A cruck post remains in situ on the north wall of the ruin, and a heavy chamfered cross beam has fallen. Similar beams with sockets for joists have been reused as wallplate lintels in the cartshed opening.

Inside, the lower room has a fine fireplace with ovolo-moulded ashlar jambs and an ovolo-moulded oak lintel, with the right jamb slightly moved to the right when the oven was inserted. There is a wide chamfered and stopped beam in the original rear wall position. In the adjoining room to the east, which was originally the hall, there is an unaccounted-for external projection (now within the rear wing) beside the lateral fireplace, likely indicating the position of a stair. The wing has three roughly chamfered cross beams, and a fragment of an earlier oak roof structure survives in the main roof space over the hall.