Blackdowns Farmhouse

Blackdowns Farmhouse is a Grade II listed building in Ebrington, located on Blackdowns Hill to the west of Stretton-on-Fosse. Dating from circa 1820, it incorporates a pre-1700 building and later additions, making it a significant example of a fashionable late-Georgian reworking of an earlier dwelling.

The main house is constructed in ashlar Cotswold limestone with a timber roof structure and slate coverings. The earlier range is built of rubble stone with timber beams. The building features timber joinery, floorboards, and some stone flagstone flooring throughout, with hand-sawn elm floorboards remaining in parts of the first floor and attic.

The farmhouse is a three-bay, double-depth building with a central hallway and rooms either side on the ground floor. The internal plan form of the early-19th-century range is largely unaltered. Later wings extend from the north-east and north-west corners.

The two-storey house stands under a pyramidal roof with oversailing eaves and two stone stacks. The principal south-east elevation has three bays, while the south-west elevation has two bays. Both are constructed in ashlar stone with fine jointing and feature early-19th-century sixteen-pane sash windows with shallow stone cills. One ground floor window has been replaced with a 20th-century metal French window. The north-west elevation, facing the farmyard, is part-ashlar and part-rubble with varied window openings. The rubble elevations form part of the early core and show evidence of a raised roof height and reordered window openings. A drystone wall with stone coping and a door opening is attached to the south-west corner. Two later wings of lower, two-storey height are attached to the north, partly faced in ashlar under hipped slate roofs. The north-west wing is of standard mid-20th-century design and construction. Farm buildings provide a varied farmstead context.

Interior features of particular note include the main stair with wreathed inlaid handrail, stick balusters, and decorative riser. Good quality joinery survives, including shutters in reveals, window and door frames, skirting boards, and picture rails. Cornice mouldings and floorboards are present throughout. One bedroom retains a 19th-century fireplace and button bell, together with an iron fixing, possibly part of a bell pull. The 17th-century range contains modified chamfered and stopped beams, 17th-century joists, stone flag floors, and some hand-sawn elm floorboards from that period. A wattle and daub wall is partly hidden by an inserted stair.

The site has likely supported a farm since at least the 17th century. Thomas Corbett Southam purchased the farm in 1791, and it later passed to the Dee family around 1799. Richard Fletcher bought the farm in 1824. A tithe map of 1844 shows the farmstead still under Fletcher ownership into the 1850s, when it was used for mixed arable and livestock farming. The farm subsequently passed to Edmund Gibbs, and a reordered farm complex is shown on the 1883 First Edition Ordnance Survey map. It has remained in agricultural use throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.

The farmhouse is largely intact despite extensions and alterations, and its original agricultural use remains plainly legible. Few buildings of this type from this period of relative agricultural depression survive in the Cotswolds, and the combination of its late-Georgian architectural character with its incorporation of an earlier pre-1700 structure, coupled with good quality interior fittings and pre-1700 floor treatments, adds to the building's special architectural and historical interest.