Ford Farmhouse

Ford Farmhouse is a farmhouse dating from around 1680, with later 20th-century windows and some internal re-arrangements of the same period. The house is built of colourwashed rendered cob with a slate roof, gabled at the ends, and features end stacks with brick shafts, alongside a projecting stone rubble stack with an oven in the rear left wing. It has a U-shaped plan, originally comprising three rooms with the principal rooms on either side of a central entrance hall, which includes a stair and an adjacent passage to the rear. The rear left and right wings contained service rooms, with the rear left wing originally serving as a kitchen and featuring a lateral stack on the inner return wall. In the late 20th century, the principal ground floor room was enlarged by moving the partition wall towards the centre of the house.

The symmetrical front has a coved eaves line and seven bays, with the central bay slightly projecting. A 20th-century open porch with a gabled roof, supported by columns, has been added. The windows are late 20th-century plastic top-hung casements set within original window embrasures; these replaced earlier casements with high transoms.

Inside, the house retains high-quality features from around 1680, including decorated plasterwork. The principal ground floor room features a bolection-moulded chimney piece with an integral landscape painting on boards in the overmantel. A central cross beam is cased in moulded plaster, with plaster ovals enriched with thistles and oak leaves on either side. A dog leg staircase has a flat handrail and thick barley sugar balusters extending up to a third flight leading to the attic. The principal first floor room has a bolection-moulded chimney piece with a painting depicting a hunting scene in the overmantel; it includes a 19th-century grate and ceilings decorated with plaster floral motifs. A ground floor room has a massive fireplace with stone jambs and a plain timber lintel. One original door survives between this room and the former kitchen to the rear, featuring panels formed by moulded battens and a chamfered pegged door frame with ogee stops. The former kitchen contains a massive open fireplace. The attic, presumably used as a garret, has oak floor boards, and the roof structure was inaccessible during a 1985 survey, but the trusses appear to be contemporary with the house. The internal features of Ford Farmhouse, particularly the high-class plasterwork and joinery, are noteworthy. The ground floor overmantel painting is illustrated in Country Life and is thought to be of Dutch origin.