Heath Farmhouse Including Stables Adjoining To East, And Including Front Garden Walls Adjoining To South

SX 69 NE SPREYTON HEATH ROAD

1/275 Heath Farmhouse including stables adjoining to east, and 22.2.67 including front garden walls adjoining to south GV II

Farmhouse. Early-mid C18 but parts may be C16 or C17; modernised in mid-late C19. Plastered cob and stone rubble; stone rubble stacks topped with C19 brick tops; thatch roof, replaced with corrugated asbestos over stables, rear block and outshots. Plan and development: L-shaped building. The main block faces south and is built across a gentle hillslope. The house has a 3-room-and-through-passage plan house. At the left end there is an inner room kitchen with a large end stack. The hall, now the dining room, has an axial stack backing onto the passage which now contains the C19 main stair. The lower end room is now a parlour with a gable-end stack backing onto the stable block at the right (east) end. Service rear block projecting at right angles to rear of the inner room kitchen which contains one unheated room behind a through passage along the back of the main block. There is a series of outshots to rear of the main block, the latest one blocking the passage rear doorway. Although no features earlier than the C18 appear in the house its plan-form appears to be C16. It may have been rebuilt on the old foundations although early fabric may survive and be hidden under later plaster. The house probably began as some form of open hall house, maybe heated by an open hearth fire. The fireplaces would have been inserted in the later C16 and C17 and the house progressively floored over. Now the farmhouse is 2 storeys throughout. Exterior: the main house has a very attractive 4-window front of similar mid-late C19 2 and 3-light casements with glazing bars. The passage front doorway contains a contemporary 4-panel door, overlight with margin panes, panelled reveals and flat hood on shaped brackets (now propped on cast iron posts). The front wall continues right as the blind rear wall of the stables. The roof is gable-ended. The rear block (also gable-ended) includes a first floor C19 casement window containing rectangular panes of leaded glass. Interior is largely the result of the mid-late C19 modernisation. The large kitchen fireplace is granite with a soffit-chamfered oak lintel; it is early C18 or even earlier. No other carpentry detail shows and the joinery and other detail is consistently mid-late C19. Roof was not accessible except in the stable where it is carried on A-frame trusses with pegged and spiked lap-jointed collars. The front garden is enclosed by a low stone rubble wall with rounded granite ashlar coping and includes monolithic granite gate posts, square in section with rounded heads.

Listing NGR: SX6933597343