Valley Cottage

Valley Cottage is a small house, likely dating from the early 17th century or earlier, with later 20th-century additions. The construction is painted stone rubble with a thatched roof featuring gabled ends and an exposed slate wall plate at the rear. A stone rubble stack is located at the left end, tapering towards the top and finished with slate weathering. This stack was later heightened with brick and topped with a yellow clay louvred pot.

Originally a single-room cottage, a small room was partitioned off to the right, incorporating a staircase in the rear right-hand corner. There was formerly a gable-end stack at the high left end, with fireplaces on both floors and a large stair turret on the front-left-hand corner. The stair has been removed, and the turret converted into an outhouse. The lower right-hand end wall has been rebuilt, suggesting the house may have originally been two rooms wide. The roof timbers are blackened, potentially due to pitch used for preservation rather than smoke from a hearth.

The front of the house is asymmetrical, with a two-window façade. A thatched roof overhangs a projecting stair turret on the left corner, with a later doorway on its right side. A central 20th-century glazed door is accessed via a late-20th century outshut porch with a thatched lean-to roof. To the right of the porch is a small 20th-century 2-light casement under eyebrowed eaves. The right-hand gable end has another small 20th-century casement. The higher left end is blank with the bowed outer wall of the stair turret, partially corbelled out at the top and featuring a small, blocked window. A single-story concrete block extension with a thatched roof was under construction at the rear during the 1988 survey.

Inside, the ground floor has three cambered, chamfered ceiling cross-beams and one half beam in the right-hand end wall, one of which has indeterminate stops. The ground floor fireplace has been partly blocked. Above, the chamber fireplace has dressed stone jambs and a chamfered timber lintel with hollow step stops. A 19th-century staircase occupies the rear right-hand corner, featuring a simple railed balustrade. The roof comprises three trusses with straight principals, halved cambered collars, threaded purlins and a diagonal ridge-piece, likely trenched. The common rafters are also intact, and all the timbers are blackened.