Bowdel Buddle Cottage

Buddle Cottage and Bowdel

Two adjoining cottages formed from a former farmhouse, possibly with a 16th-century core but now mostly dating from the early 17th century, with an 18th-century extension. The building is constructed of plastered cob on rubble footings, with stone stacks carrying 19th and 20th-century brick chimney shafts. The roof is thatched.

The original structure was a three-room-and-cross-passage house facing south-west, with an inner room at the north-west end and a projecting stair turret (now disused) to the rear of the passage. A single room was added to the south-east in the 18th century. The large stack projects forward of the hall, an axial stack in the former gable end serves the service room, and a rear lateral stack serves the 18th-century extension. Buddle Cottage now occupies the former inner room and hall, while Bowdel occupies the former service room and the 18th-century extension.

The building has two storeys with some disused attics. The front elevation is irregular with seven windows of late 19th and early 20th-century casements. The door to Buddle Cottage, set to the left of the projecting hall stack, is inserted into the former upper end of the hall and has a 20th-century glass-sided porch. The window to the right of the stack occupies the position of the original passage door. The door to Bowdel is towards the right end with a small 20th-century hood and leads into the 18th-century extension. The eaves drop in level over the extension. The roof is half-hipped to the left and hipped to the right.

The rear elevation is mostly blank, though the stair turret has a blocked early 17th-century oak four-light window with ovolo-moulded mullions.

Internally, the house shows good exposure of early work. The hall-passage screen has been removed. The passage-service screen is a full-height partition forming the party wall between the two present cottages, clad but said to be an oak plank-and-muntin screen at ground floor level with floral painted ornamentation. Above, the first floor has a second tier of oak plank-and-muntin screen with framing in which cob nogging is held on a ladder of sturdy horizontal riven oak lathes fitted into individual holes in each side of the posts. The partition at the upper end of the hall is exposed only in the roofspace, showing identical framing.

The hall was apparently floored from the beginning. Its two crossbeams are identical to the axial beam in the inner room, both featuring double ovolo moulding with scroll stops. The hall fireplace is blocked. The service room has a chamfered and scroll-stopped crossbeam and a massive granite fireplace with an oven to the rear and the remains of a walk-in smoking chamber to the left. On the first floor over the service room (Bowdel), two rooms are said to be separated by an oak plank-and-muntin screen and have chamfered and scroll-stopped axial beams. A flat-arched door to the stair turret has a chamfered surround and scroll stops, and another door is suspected from the landing to the hall chamber in Buddle Cottage.

The roof is carried on a series of side-pegged jointed cruck trusses with dovetail lap-jointed collars. An early 17th-century attic exists over the service room and possibly over the inner room. The 18th-century extension has plain carpentry detail.

The building was constructed as a substantial house with spacious, high rooms and carpentry of high standard. It is unusual for Devon in being entirely of early 17th-century date as far as can be seen. The house appears to have undergone only minor alterations since the early 17th century, with all exposed features dating from that period, though more features are undoubtedly hidden.