Great Huish

Great Huish is a farmhouse of early 16th-century origins with significant remodelling in the 17th century and later alterations in the 20th century, located at Huish Lane, Tedburn St Mary.

The building is constructed of whitewashed rendered cob with a slate and corrugated asbestos roof, gabled at the right end, and an axial brick stack at the right end. It is two storeys tall.

The plan is complex and has evolved significantly. The present layout comprises a single-depth main range five rooms wide, with a wide entrance hall containing the stair, and a rear kitchen wing to the right of centre, forming a T-plan. The earliest part of the house appears to be the four left-hand rooms, dating from the early 16th century. The extreme left-hand room is now used as an outbuilding, and the adjoining room to the right serves as a store room. This store room contains a fine early 16th-century plank and muntin oak screen with foliage carving on the top rail and unusual angled step stops. The two adjoining rooms to the right have been subdivided in the 20th century, but mortises in a cross beam to the right of the putative hall likely indicate a former screen at the lower end of a cross passage. The extreme right-hand room, the present stair hall, and entrance probably date to around 1620, supported by a fragmentary date on a plaster overmantel. The absence of a chimney stack to the putative hall suggests that an open hall may have survived as late as 1690, when a new hall and parlour were added at the right-hand end with a kitchen wing at right angles. At this time, the early 16th-century hall may have been converted to an unheated service room. A rear lean-to adjoining the early 16th-century hall is probably a later addition.

The five-window front is irregular, with three separate roof lines and the front door positioned under a sloping slate roof to the right of centre. Three ground floor windows are small-pane two- and three-light casements of circa late 19th-century date. The first floor has been largely refenestrated with 20th-century casements, except for one three-light small-pane casement to the left of centre.

Internally, the second room from the left (now a store room) has a pitched stone floor, a chamfered cross beam with step stops, and a very fine early 16th-century plank and muntin oak screen with foliage carving on the top rail and unusual angled step stops. The left-hand room (now an outbuilding and probably the inner room) has a chamfered cross beam with step stops and an open fireplace with stone rubble jambs and a timber lintel. The room to the left of the stair hall has a partly boxed-in beam, chamfered with diagonal stops. The right-hand room has a cross beam, and the chimney piece in the first floor room above shows fragmentary remains of plasterwork bearing a probable date of 1690.

At the time of survey in 1985, there was no access to the roof space, but two jointed cruck trusses are visible in the first floor room from the left, which also has a heavy framed partition above the plank and muntin screen. Other features are likely to exist behind wall plaster. The building may have originated as a medieval open hall house, though this remains unproven. The house possesses an intriguing building history with early internal features including a fine screen and a roof structure which may be medieval.