Barton Including Adjoining Hothouse To Rear Courtyarad And Remains Of Chapel Umberleigh House

Umberleigh House and Barton

A large house at Atherington, now occupied as two dwellings, with substantial medieval and post-medieval fabric. The building incorporates remains of a 13th-century chapel surviving in attached outhouses to the rear courtyard, alongside considerable late 15th-century fabric to the main range that is largely concealed by late 18th and early 19th-century remodelling. A large 17th-century wing was added to the rear. The structure is built of painted rendered stone rubble beneath a slate roof with gable ends and asbestos slates to the rear. Ridge and gable end brick stacks are positioned to the south side and left end, with similar rubble stacks featuring drips at the right end. An axial rubble stack sits towards the gable end of the rear wing.

The medieval ground floor plan has been largely obscured by Georgian remodelling which created two large rooms to the left and three rooms to the right of a wide entrance hall. The original 15th-century structure was a massive ten-bay building, possibly an open hall house though always heated by a stack. In the 17th century, a large wing was added to the rear right end, creating an overall L-shaped plan with a covered cart entrance and former chapel incorporated into piggeries, completing a three-sided rear courtyard plan. Two storeys rise to the main building, with garrets to the rear wing.

The front elevation presents a symmetrical five-bay classical centre range with two additional bays at the left end and a canted two-storey bay with conical roof at the right end, both ends breaking forward slightly. The central range displays a five-window range of hornless twelve-paned sashes over two similar sashes flanking each side of a Tuscan porch with engaged pilasters. The door is six-panelled with a fanlight. Similar fenestration appears to the two left end bays with a twentieth-century door. The canted bay at the right end is blind. The rear wing has irregular fenestration with mostly twenty-paned hornless sashes.

The back wall of the outhouses to the rear originally formed the south wall of the chapel and contains fragments of chamfered window jambs and a complete infilled 13th-century doorway with engaged shafts topped with lipped capitals from which the moulded pointed arch springs.

Interior features include a late 18th and early 19th-century geometrical staircase to the entrance hall with wreathed handrail and stick balusters. A nineteenth-century Adam style chimneypiece and ceiling centrepiece ornament a room to the right, while moulded cornices grace both this room and the room to the left of the entrance hall, which contains a marble chimneypiece. A small stone bearing the Champernowne crest has been reset in the rear wall of the entrance hall. The majority of upper floor rooms in the east wing retain late 17th-century moulded plaster cornices, with a late 17th-century staircase ascending to the garrets featuring a moulded handrail and splat balusters. A eighteenth-century balustrade with turned balusters tops the staircase leading from the main range into the rear wing.

The most remarkable survival is the roof structure. Over the main range from the left end, eleven arch-braced trusses with short curved feet support three tiers of threaded purlins and a ridge purlin, with morticed and tenoned straight collars. The soffits of the arch bracing feature hollow flanking roll mouldings, with roll mouldings to both top and bottom arrises of the inner faces of the purlins and to the underside of the ridge purlin. The two left end bays retain their full two tiers of curved windbracing to the north side, with all but two of the bays retaining a single tier of windbraces. These windbraces possess identical mouldings to the purlins. Each end truss is moulded on its inner face. Beyond the right end truss is a closed truss with short curved feet featuring mortices for studs, then five more trusses with short curved feet, the second truss being closed with a solid stone partition. The rear wing has four 17th-century trusses with high lap-jointed collars and halvings for raking struts to the tie beams.

The house was formerly a seat of the Bassett family. The exceptionally high quality of the roof carpentry places it in the very top category of medieval survivals in North Devon.