Easter Cottage

Easter Cottage

Easter Cottage is a two-storey cob building on a stone plinth, rendered and covered with Roman tile roofs. Brick stacks stand at either end of the main range. The building comprises a single-depth main range running east to west with a pitched roof, and a later wing attached to the west end of the rear (north) elevation, running north-west to south-east with a hipped roof.

The main range presents a three-bay front elevation. The central bay contains a twentieth-century four-panel entrance door with a partly glazed twentieth-century porch. Above the door and in the flanking bays are five twelve-pane pegged timber casement windows. The east elevation is blank with a brick stack above it. A modern brick car shelter with a corrugated iron roof has been added to the east end of the rear elevation, where the cob wall shows evidence of rebuilding. A small nineteenth-century four-pane casement window sits in the main range above the lean-to. The west elevation features an external chimney stack. The rear wing is one and a half storeys tall with a later single-storey lean-to on the east side. Most windows in the extension are twentieth-century.

Inside, the two-room ground-floor plan of the main range remains largely unchanged except for relocation of the stairway. The current stairway dates to the late nineteenth century with a plain stick balustrade and ball finial newel post, repositioned opposite the main entrance. The entrance door opens into the east end ground-floor room, where a set of late nineteenth to early twentieth-century decorative floor tiles runs from the entrance to the north wall. This room contains a fireplace with a chamfered bressumer and modern burner, with a chamfered stopped beam running across the room; the stop on the west side of the south end is set slightly in from the wall and may indicate the original stairway location. The west end room is smaller and contains a large fireplace with a bressumer and bread oven, with another axial chamfered stopped beam running through it. A plank door with strap hinges gives access to the rear wing, which contains a roughly hewn axial ceiling beam.

The second-floor plan has been altered by the stairway relocation, with plasterboard walls inserted to create three rooms and a corridor in the main range. All doors on this floor are of timber plank construction. The room to the left of the stair retains late eighteenth to early nineteenth-century 'L' hinges; the other bedroom doors have modern strap hinges. The room to the right of the stairs has a mid-twentieth-century square light above the door. Opposite this bedroom is a double plank door with late eighteenth to early nineteenth-century 'H' and modern strap hinges, which leads down into the second storey of the rear extension, now a modern bathroom. A rolled steel joist has been inserted above this door. The collar roof has four pegged trusses and some other historic timbers survive, though most rafters and purlins are modern replacements. Part of the east gable end wall has been rebuilt in concrete breeze block. The roof over the rear wing contains some pegged beams, but considerable alteration has occurred through the insertion of a twentieth to twenty-first-century boiler within the roof space.