Marylea And Number 3

This is a group of two cottages, Marylea and Number 3, located in Down St Mary. They likely originated as a church house in the 16th century, with significant alterations and improvements in the 17th century, and further extensions and rebuilding in the early 18th and 19th centuries. The construction is predominantly cob on rubble footings, with stone rubble or cob stacks topped with 19th and 20th-century brick, and a thatch roof, with a red interlocking tile roof to the later 19th-century extension.

The building faces south, with Number 3 at the west end and Marylea in the centre and east end, occupying two former cottages. The original layout was a three-room-through-passage plan house with a service room at the west end. Number 3 incorporates the former service room, with a projecting end stack, the through passage, and a hall with an axial stack backing onto the passage. Marylea encompasses the former inner room and an early 18th-century single-room extension with an axial stack serving back-to-back fireplaces. A 19th-century service extension is attached to the rear of Marylea, and a two-storey service block with a tile monopitch roof and gabled dormers sits behind it, to the rear.

The front elevation is irregular, featuring a five-window arrangement of mixed 19th and 20th-century casements, many with glazing bars. The central three first-floor windows contain rectangular panes of leaded glass. A door towards the left end (leading to Number 3) has a doorframe likely dating to the 17th century, with a chamfered frame and a 19th-century plank door. A roughly central door serves Marylea.

The interior reveals mostly late 17th and early 18th-century features, including roughly chamfered crossbeams and plainly finished fireplace lintels. The stacks in both the former hall and service room are cob, and all fireplaces originally had side ovens, though some are now blocked. A roof structure of A-frame trusses with pegged lap-jointed collars and X-apexes is visible in Number 3. While the roof is inaccessible in Marylea, the feet of the principals suggest a similar truss structure.

Evidence of the original 16th-century construction remains in Number 3, where a rear passage door has an oak elliptical-headed frame, and a side-pegged jointed cruck truss is partially visible in the roof. Other early features may be concealed.