Slantycombe Farmhouse

HOCKWORTHY ST 01 NW 4/71 Slantycombe Farmhouse - - II Farmhouse. C16 core, refurbished and rearranged in the mid C17. The west end wall was rebuilt after a collapse circa 1900. Plastered walls, the front is stone rubble, the rear cob on stone rubble footings; stone rubble stacks the main one with its original stone rubble chimneyshaft; slate roof, formerly thatch. Plan and development: 3-room lobby entrance plan house built across the hillslope and facing south. At right end is a small room now used as a kitchen. It has a projecting gable-end stack but this is thought to be an C18 or C19 insertion. It was probably an unheated dairy. The centre room, the hall, was used as a kitchen and the left room was a parlour. Kitchen and parlour share an axial stack serving back-to-back fireplaces and the front lobby entrance is between these room onto the side of the stack. This layout is apparently the result of a major renovation of a C16 house, probably an early or mid C16 3-room-and-through-passage plan house. The C17 kitchen appears to have been the hall. It was open to the roof and heated by an open hearth fire. The fireplace here was probably built in the late C16 backing onto the passage. The passage was abolished in the mid C17 when the parlour fireplace was built backing onto the former hall stack and the whole house was rearranged. It is 2 storeys and there is a secondary outshot to rear of the hall/kitchen. Exterior: irregular 4-window front of late C19 and C20 casements, the latest without glazing bars, and including one partly blocked window in which the surviving single light contains rectangular panes of-leaded glass. The front doorway is left of centre and contains a late C19 plank door with contemporary hood on shaped brackets. Roof is gable-ended. Interior: the parlour carpentry is all mid C17. The axial beam is soffit-chamfered with bar scroll stops, the same finish as the oak lintel of the stone rubble fireplace. The hall/kitchen fireplace is different. It has an oak framed surround suggesting that it may have a cob chimney. The crossbeam here has broad soffit- chamfers and no stops. A half beam is set well in front of the chimneybreast for some unknown reason. No carpentry is exposed in the former dairy. The present stairs rise behind the hall stack. They are late C19 or C20 but a hollow in the rear wall of here suggests that they occupy the position of the originals. The roof is carried on 4 trusses, all of which have side-pegged jointed cruck principals set into the cob rear wall and straight principals onto the frost stone wall. The centre 2 are smoke-blackened from the C16 open hearth.

Listing NGR: ST0193919374