Old Stones And School Cottage Pay Cottage

Old Stones, Pay Cottage and School Cottage

Three cottages formerly used as an almshouse or church house, dating from the early 16th century with a late 18th-century addition. The buildings are constructed from slate stone rubble walls, roughly coursed at the front, with a gable-ended slate roof featuring Victorian decorative ridge tiles and a hipped roof to the front wing. Two brick gable-end stacks are present: one at the side of the front wing and a stubby rendered rubble lateral stack at the front.

The original plan or room use is not entirely clear due to later subdivisions, but the building may have been constructed as three cottages on the ground floor with one large public room above. A through-passageway runs from front to back, positioned left of centre, with doorways to Old Stones and Pay Cottage opening off it. School Cottage has an original outside doorway at the rear and a small wing at the back which may have served as either a garderobe or staircase wing. A late 18th-century parlour wing was added to the front of School Cottage. There appears originally to have been external access to the first floor, as evidenced by doorways at both front and rear, though the steps have since been removed. Either the front or rear lateral stack would have heated this floor.

Externally, the buildings comprise two storeys with an asymmetrical five-window front. A partly slate-hung wing projects from the right-hand end of School Cottage. Most windows in the main range are two or three-light late 19th-century casements. The ground floor windows are set in original chamfered openings, with the two left-hand ones featuring shouldered heads. On the first floor, the left-hand window is an original four-light moulded stone mullion with four-centred heads and leaded panes. The window to the right of centre was probably similar but has had its mullions removed, with only the jambs surviving. Between these two is a window in what was formerly an original doorway with a roundheaded voussoir arch, with an identical doorway with a 20th-century plank door beneath it. The School Cottage wing has two replacement 16-pane sash windows on its front face and a lean-to porch against its inner face with a hall door.

The rear elevation has a very small gabled wing at the left-hand end and two similar roundheaded doorways on the ground floor: one towards the left-hand end and one to the rear of the passageway. An identical doorway, now a window, is positioned above the latter to the right. To the left of these doorways is a projecting rubble stack cut off at the eaves. Several of the windows are set in original chamfered openings with shouldered heads.

Internally, Pay Cottage retains unstopped chamfered cross beams. The original roof survives over the whole range, comprising six bays (two missing) of substantial principals, some with curved feet and some side-pegged jointed crucks, with plain morticed cambered collars and threaded purlins. Although darkened in colour, the timbers are unlikely to be smoke-blackened. This represents an interesting survival of a late medieval building of a type fairly characteristic of this area, which remains surprisingly unspoilt externally and, unusually for South Devon, retains its medieval roof structure.