Huxtables Farmhouse

EAST AND WEST BUCKLAND SS 63 SE 3/18 - Huxtables Farmhouse 20.2.67 GV II

Farmhouse. Early C16, remodelled in late C16 and again in early C17. Unrendered stone rubble. Concrete tiled roof with gable ends. Axial stone rubble stack and brick stack at right end. 3-room-and-cross-passage, former open hall house, the hall stack unusually sited away from the cross-passage at the upper end of the hall. 2 staircases, one inserted in cross-passage and another running up rear wall of inner room. 2 storeys, 3-window range. C20 fenestration. 2-light casements, 2 panes per light. Two 3-light casements to ground floor, 3 panes per light flanking plank door. Pigeon-hole to left of right-hand top window. The inner room end is, unusually, blind on both floors, principally owing to a concealed internal lateral stack inserted to the front of the inner room, the shaft having been demolished. Dairy outshut to rear of hall. Interior: low plank and muntin screen between hall and cross passage, 6 planks wide, the muntins chamfered. Doorway to centre, the lintel removed, with old reset 4 plank door. The screen at the rear end had had 2 sections removed to make another doorway into the hall, but this has again been infilled and the screen replaced in same style. Chamfered jetty bressumer over screen with mortices for joists supporting loft floor over cross-passage, only one of the joists partly survives with step-stopped chamfers. Above the jetty beam is another chamfered step-stopped bressumer which, with the cross ceiling beam, chamfered with pyramid stops, supports the inserted hall ceiling. Integral bench below hall window. Dressed stone jambs to hall fireplace which has slightly cambered stone arch instead of usual lintel. Brick-lined oven. Fine 4-centred arched doorway with chamfered surround into inner room to right of fireplace. Inner room has roughly chamfered axial beam. Cambered brick arch to fireplace with further brick-lined bread oven. Old, possibly C18, thin chamfered surround to hall/dairy doorway. Part of the original roof structure survives with C20 roof timbers superimposed. Solid cob walls rise to the apex of the roof between hall and inner room and cross- passage and lower end. Single raised cruck truss over hall with morticed and tenoned collar, 2 tiers of threaded purlins and threaded ridge purlin, all thoroughly smoke-blackened. The surviving purlins over the inner room appear to be clean, and the 2 trusses over the lower end were replaced probably in C19. It appears, therefore, that the inner room was probably from the outset, the hall originally open to the roof and jettied at the lower end, while the lower end itself, to judge by a straight joint to the rear wall, was rebuilt, in the absence of surviving features, probably in the C17.

Listing NGR: SS6644330849