The Barton

The Barton is a farmhouse of Medieval origin, significantly altered and extended through subsequent centuries. The building demonstrates the evolution of domestic architecture across five centuries, with major phases of development in the 16th, 17th, and mid-19th centuries.

The earliest rear wing dates to around the 15th century and was originally an open hall heated by an open hearth fire. In the 16th century, floors were inserted to create upper chambers, and an axial stack was built in the hall, backing onto the cross-passage, while the hall remained open to the roof. During the 17th century, the hall was floored with a framed ceiling, the front east wall was rebuilt as a projecting hall bay, and a one-room parlour wing with a chamber above and an end stack was constructed behind the hall to the west.

Around the mid-19th century, the lower south end of the house was replaced by a new two-storey, three-bay stone range with a central entrance and stairhall, relegating the original house to a rear north service wing and creating an overall T-shaped plan. The stone outshut in the north-west angle and the 17th-century west wing also received Victorian additions at this time.

The exterior presents a symmetrical three-bay south front of two storeys with a cellar, featuring 19th-century twelve-pane sash windows in stone cambered arch openings with stone cills. A wooden canted bay window appears on the left ground floor. The central doorway contains a 19th-century panelled and glazed door with a fanlight displaying radiating glazing bars beneath a depressed two-centred arch. The rendered cob rear wing retains two-light casement windows with glazing bars, and its east front displays a three-window range with a projecting central hall bay.

Interior features are extensive. The Victorian south range contains an open-well staircase with intact balustrade and panelled doors, along with some chimneypieces and servants' bells. The Medieval rear wing preserves exceptional historic fabric. The hall features a large fireplace in the axial stack with monolithic stone jambs, a massive chamfered timber bressumer with run-out stops, and a Victorian cooking range. The 17th-century framed ceiling displays deeply-chamfered intersecting beams. Seventeenth-century benches on shaped bracket feet occupy the high side of the hall and continue into the projecting bay, with three small wall cupboards also present. A chamfered door frame with cyma stops separates the hall from the inner room. The large inner north room contains roughly-chamfered axial beams without stops. The parlour in the west wing features chamfered cross-beams with notched run-out stops and a blocked fireplace. Nineteenth-century axial partitions were introduced to both hall and inner room.

The roof structure is of particular importance. The Medieval open-hall roof survives largely intact and smoke-blackened from end-to-end, demonstrating its original heating by open hearth fire. It features a face-pegged jointed cruck truss on the hall side of the stack with a chamfered high collar, a diagonally-trenched ridgepiece, tenoned purlins, and many original common-rafters including hip structure at the north end. However, this structure was truncated at the south end during the mid-19th-century replacement of the lower section of the house. The original smoke-blackened battens and thatch were removed in the late 20th century and replaced by a new roof constructed over the old structure. A cob wall was subsequently built in place of the truss between the hall and inner room. The 17th-century roof structure over the west wing features a truss crossed at the apex with a lapped collar. The mid-19th-century south range has king-post trusses.

The Barton represents an interesting example of a traditional multi-phase Devon farmhouse retaining features from all major periods of its development, with little alteration since the 19th century.