Bushells Cottages

Three cottages, likely incorporating a core from an earlier date, with significant development in the 17th century. The walls are plastered cob, built on rubble footings. The stacks are of stone rubble or cob with 19th-century brick tops, and the roof is corrugated iron, covering the remnants of a thatched roof. Two cottages on the right (east) have a single room each and rear lateral stacks, while the cottage to the left (west) has two rooms and an attached store. The layout includes a main room with an axial stack. The front has an irregular arrangement of four windows, likely dating to the 18th and 19th centuries, with many retaining fragments of old leaded glass and glazing bars. A low gable is positioned over the center first-floor window. Two doorways on the right appear to be from the 17th century, with chamfered frames and plank doors hung on step hinges; one features possible 18th-century graffiti. The two doorways on the left are 19th-century. The original roof was gabled at each end, with a hip design. The right-end room features a cobbled floor, a roughly chamfered axial beam, a rubble fireplace with a plain oak lintel, and a rear Bideford cloam oven with an unusual two-handled door. The center-right room contains a late 17th-century soffit-chamfered and straight-cut stopped crossbeam and scratch-moulded joists. It also has a rear rubble fireplace with a plain soffit-chamfered oak lintel and a 19th-century brick bread oven inserted or replacing the original. The left-center room was modernized in the 19th century, and its axial beam is now boxed in. The original fireplace is hidden behind a 19th-century chimney piece and grate. The store at the left end has a roughly chamfered axial beam. The accessible roof structure comprises probably late 17th-century A-frame trusses with pegged lap-jointed collars. The cottages remain largely unmodernized. They have been unoccupied since approximately 1960 and were formerly occupied by the Bushell family, who were master carpenters and joiners. The family took two generations to rebuild the rood screen in the nearby Church of St Mary.