The Farmhouse, The Olde Dairy And Fir Tree Cottage

A farmhouse of 17th-century or earlier date, standing in an isolated farmstead setting to the west of Totnes. The building was extended, probably in the 18th century, and remodelled around the middle of the 19th century and in the late 20th century. It has undergone subdivision and alteration over time.

The structure consists of a long, single-depth range of rendered stone rubble with slate, cedar shingle and asbestos roofs. The original plan is uncertain: the left-hand end may represent the higher end of a three-room house, with its lower end now demolished and having extended to the right. A two-room addition with a central stair hall, probably of 18th-century date, stands at the higher left end. A lateral stack at the rear of the earlier right end may be the hall stack. To the rear right of the 18th-century extension is an early to mid-20th-century wing, with a further late-20th-century wing at the rear left. Additional 20th-century lean-to outshuts exist at the rear.

The exterior presents as a two-storey, asymmetrically disposed range of approximately eight bays. At the lower right end is a 19th-century three-light casement with horizontal glazing bars. At first-floor left stands a two-light casement with margin frames. A doorway to the left of the lower end has a rectangular six-pane fanlight in a heavy frame. At ground-floor level are three mid-19th-century French windows with margin panes and intersecting glazing bars in round-arched fanlights. To the right are 20th-century metal-frame windows in round-arched openings and a central doorway with a 20th-century plank door, semi-circular fanlight and 20th-century porch. First-floor windows have margin panes and are set in gabled half dormers. To the rear of the lower end is a rendered stack with set-offs, 19th-century two and three-light casements with glazing bars, and a 20th-century outshut with lean-to roof. At the rear of the higher end is a round-arched stair window with margin panes, flanked by two 20th-century wings with a 20th-century lean-to between them. The roof is half-hipped at the lower right end and gabled at the left end. An axial chimney stack to the right of centre has thatch weathering; a second stack stands as a left-hand gable end stack on the roof.

The interior was not inspected in 2009. The first floor of the lower right end is understood to have a passage along the rear with a plank partition and two-panel doors. The roof over the lower end has principal rafters with straight feet, morticed for a threaded ridge, threaded purlins and dovetail lap-jointed collars. At the higher left end, which has suffered fire damage, the principal rafters are cleared with morticed apexes; the collars are halved and pegged to the face of the principals.

The building is shown on the Ordnance Survey Maps of 1887 and 1906, though the footprint indicates some alteration when compared to the modern map. A railway line was built to the south in the mid-19th century.