Higher Week Farmhouse

Higher Week Farmhouse is a farmhouse dating back to around 1600, constructed from rendered stone rubble and cob, with a bitumenised slate roof. The original house features a hall to the right, originally heated by an axial brick stack built against a cross-passage. Evidence of faint smoke-blackening on the roof timbers over the hall suggests it may have initially been open to the roof before the stack was inserted. A solid stone and cob partition separates the hall from a later, probably 19th-century inner room.

Around the same time, the house was extended to the rear to include a double flight of stairs, each running alongside the rear wall of the hall; one serving the room above the cross-passage, the other the chambers over the hall and inner room. The original staircase was likely located at the rear lower end of the hall, beside the axial stack and doorway connecting the hall to the cross-passage. A lean-to was added in the late 19th century, with a doorway cut through the gable end wall below the cross-passage. It is unclear whether this replaced a lower service end or outbuildings.

The unheated inner room served as a dairy and salting house into recent times, suggesting the lower end, if it existed, did not contain service rooms. In the 20th century, one of the stair flights was removed, the rear doorway of the hall blocked, and access to the stairs created at the rear of the cross-passage.

The farmhouse is two storeys high and has a three-window front. Most of the windows are 20th century replacements, with the exception of a late 19th-century three-light casement window in the upper central storey. A 20th-century gabled porch with a slate roof is present.

Inside, the hall fireplace has a chamfered timber lintel and a bread oven, alongside a creamy niche in the front wall. The original roof structure remains over the hall, featuring one raised cruck truss with trenched purlins, a diagonally set ridge purlin, and straight morticed and tenoned collars. An 18th-century alteration converted the original gable end of the hall into a hip. The addition of the inner room and the rear extension involved the installation of a wide-span roof structure with a higher ridge level.