Orchard Farmhouse

Orchard Farmhouse is a farmhouse dating from the mid to late 16th century, with some alterations made in the 20th century. The building is constructed of rendered stone and cob, topped with a slate roof that has gable ends. There are brick stacks at each gable end and a front lateral hall stack featuring offsets and a brick shaft. The layout consists of three rooms and a through-passage plan, with a two-storey wing at right angles to the rear of the hall that includes a stair turret and a former salting house. A 20th-century dairy is located at the rear of the lower end, covered by a corrugated iron lean-to roof.

The farmhouse is two storeys high and features a four-window range with 19th and 20th-century fenestration. The windows are primarily two-light casements with four panes per light, except for the right end which has six panes per light. There is a horizontal sliding sash window at the left end with four panes per light, while the ground floor has mostly 20th-century windows. A 20th-century brick porch with a slate roof leads to the entrance, which has a four-panelled door with glazed upper panels.

Inside, the hall ceiling beam is plastered over, and there is a chamfered door surround with scroll-stopped durns at the head of the stairs leading to the room above the salting house. The gable end wall and the opposing wall of the chamber over the parlour feature 17th-century decorative plasterwork cornices. The chamber over the hall has a moulded plasterwork cornice. The structure includes three mid to late 16th-century trusses over the hall and parlour, characterized by straight principals, threaded purlins, a ridge purlin, and thin morticed and tenoned straight collars. The truss above the hall shows slight smoke-blackening. The truss over the lower end was replaced in the early 20th century when a secondary staircase for farm servants was added to provide separate access to this end chamber from the through-passage.