Lower Leigh Farmhouse

Lower Leigh Farmhouse is a detached house near Uffculme, formerly a farmhouse. It is a puzzling structure that has evolved over more than three centuries, likely beginning as a 17th-century remodelling of an earlier house, then extended and refurbished around 1700, and again in the 1830s.

The building is constructed of roughcast cob and stone mix, with a gable-end roof thatched to the front and pantiled to the rear. A pantiled continuous outshut, largely of stone, runs along one side. It rises to two storeys.

The plan is complex and irregular. Originally this was probably a three-room, through-passage plan house with the service end to the left of the passage. A chimney stack was later inserted into the passage, creating a lobby arrangement with a narrow passage running behind the stack. The main entrance now leads into this lobby. An extension to the service end was added, slightly out of alignment with the main range and heated by an internal end stack with a bake oven. The original service end is heated by a deep stone stack, formerly an end stack, also with a bake oven and incorporating a recess for either winder stairs or a smoking chamber.

The hall presents several unusual features. The first floor is 18th century and is at two levels, taller immediately in front of the fireplace then at the higher end. This creates a platform in the chamber above, measuring about 48 square feet and 2 feet high. The function of this platform is uncertain, but it creates two distinct spaces in both the hall and chamber above, probably reflecting different activities in structurally undivided rooms. Eighteenth-century stairs have been inserted along the front face of the hall, lit by a pair of contemporary pegged two-light casement windows which externally give the impression of a single tall window.

A wing was built to the front of the inner room and is heated by an external end stack. This wing retains mid-17th-century wall decoration in the upper chamber, contemporary with or slightly earlier than the 17th-century joinery elsewhere. Around 1831 (the date of an object found within the wall) a second wing was added to the rear of the inner room. This rear wing is wider than the front wing and incorporates an axial corridor running along the lower-end side, which connects the principal 1830 room to the old hall by way of a short but elegant flight of stairs—a satisfying and imaginative piece of design.

The front elevation is notably irregular. To the right of a 19th-century timber porch with boarded gable are the paired casement windows to the hall and hall chamber. To the left of the porch is an early tall 19th-century round-headed two-light window with decorative glazing bars in the head; the lower part of this window has been renewed or extended and now straddles both floors. Further left are two large buttresses, one of which partially conceals a piece of rusticated quoining. A three-light casement window lights the service-end chamber and is set in a slightly projecting stretch of walling. A three-light casement window to the service-room extension is on the ground floor.

The front wing has one two-light casement window to the first-floor inner face. A 19th-century door flanked by twelve-pane hornless sash windows lights the ground floor. The front angles of this wing are finished in rusticated quoining. The outer face of the wing contains two late 18th-century pegged two-light casement windows and a large sixteen-pane hornless sash window lighting the principal room of the rear wing. The rear of the axial corridor of the rear wing is lit by a round-headed sash window. Nineteenth-century casements appear elsewhere.

The roof was almost entirely rebuilt since the Second World War; the only early surviving roof truss is unlikely to predate the late 17th century.

Internally, mid-17th-century mural decoration survives apparently largely intact under later panelling in the front wing chamber. Where revealed, it comprises formal floral patterning with a series of associated arcs. Much joinery dates from around 1700, principally large fielded panelled doors, including doors of wall cupboards, some with brass H-hinges. Exposed ceiling beams have very shallow chambers or bead mouldings and appear to be 18th century. Attractive early 19th-century joinery includes the stairs to the rear of the hall with ramped rails and turned newels, fielded panel doors, and in the principal room of the rear wing, internal panelled sliding shutters with panelling elsewhere.