Higher Eastington

A house, originally a small farmhouse, likely dates to the early 16th century with significant alterations in the later 16th and 17th centuries, and modernization around 1980. The walls are plastered cob on rubble footings, with rubble stacks topped with 20th-century brick and a slate roof (formerly thatched). The house is a three-room and through-passage plan, facing south-east, with an inner room on the north-eastern end. A large axial hall stack backs onto the passage, and there’s a likely 19th-century stack to the inner room. It’s now two storeys high. The front has a regular four-window arrangement of circa 1980 casements with glazing bars, and a 20th-century front door to the passage, located slightly left of centre. The roof is hipped at each end.

The interior is notable for its features. The oldest visible feature is the smoke-blackened roof structure over the hall and inner room (replaced at the service end), suggesting the original 16th-century house was divided by low partitions and heated by an open hearth. A single side-pegged jointed cruck truss is above the hall, with butt purlins, having chamfered and cut diagonal stopped edges and a threaded ridge. A rubble partition between the hall and inner room, probably dating from the mid-to-late 16th century, contains a pair of oak doorways at the rear; one is round-headed with a chamfered surround, and the other is a narrow, flat-arch headed stair door with a door rebate on the hall side. Contemporary stairs to the inner room chamber no longer exist, but the inner room chamber jetties into the hall, and the rounded ends of the inner room joists project into the hall. The hall features a substantial late 16th to early 17th-century rubble stack with an oak lintel soffit-chamfered with step stops. A half beam across the chimney breast, supporting the hall floor, is also chamfered with step stops and likely dates from the early 17th century, inscribed with the initials of Robert Newcombe and the date 1701. Passage screens have been removed, and the unheated lower end has been extensively rebuilt and the first-floor structure renewed in the 20th century.