Easterbrook

Easterbrook is a house that was originally a farmhouse, dating from the mid-16th century, with improvements made in the late 16th to early 17th century and further alterations in the 18th century. It was extended in the 19th century and modernised around 1980. The building features plastered cob on rubble footings, with some brick from the 19th and 20th centuries, and a stone rubble stack topped with 20th-century brick. The roof is made of corrugated aluminium, which replaced the original thatch.

The house has a two-room-and-through-passage layout, facing southwest, with a service room on the left (northwest) end and a projecting rear lateral stack. An inner room was added in the 19th century, and there is a large 20th-century porch at the rear of the passage. The building is two storeys high and has an irregular four-window front, featuring various 20th-century casements, most of which have glazing bars. The front passage doorway, located to the left of centre, contains a 20th-century plank door. The roof is gable-ended, and the left end wall has been completely rebuilt in 19th-century brick.

Inside, the passage-hall partition is a 16th-century oak plank-and-muntin screen, with chamfered muntins, although the lower part of the screen, including the stops, has been renewed. The hall features a volcanic ashlar fireplace with a plain soffit-chanfered oak lintel and includes a late 19th-century bread oven with a cast iron door. The hall is floored with a large crossbeam from the late 16th to early 17th century, which has broad soffit chamfers and pyramid stops, although all joists were replaced around 1980. The roof above the passage-hall screen has a side-pegged jointed cruck, which is missing its collar and shows evidence of wattle-and-daub infill. The rest of the roof over the service room, passage, and hall was replaced in the 18th century with A-frame trusses that have pegged lap-jointed collars and X-apexes, with the hipped end of that roof still surviving over the upper end of the hall. Easterbrook is a rare survival of a small 16th-century farmhouse.