West Chapple Farmhouse

West Chapple Farmhouse is a former Dartmoor longhouse, originally built in the early 16th century with substantial improvements made in the later 16th and 17th centuries. It was renovated around 1975. The building is constructed of massive blocks of roughly coursed ashlar set on massive boulder footings, with considerable granite stone rubble patching. It features granite stacks with granite ashlar chimneyshafts and a thatch roof.

The building is T-shaped in plan. The original part forms the main block, a 3-room-and-through-passage plan structure facing north-west and built down a gentle slope. The uphill right end contains a small unheated room, originally used as a dairy. The hall has a large stack backing onto the passage. The shippon, the livestock housing area, was converted into domestic use around 1970. A kitchen was added at right angles to the rear of the hall in the mid-17th century, with an end stack and a newel stair rising alongside.

The building has a long and complex structural history. The original early 16th-century house appears to have been open to the roof from end to end, divided by low partitions and heated by an open hearth fire. Through the later 16th and early 17th centuries, the rooms were progressively floored over and the hall stack was inserted. Following the addition of the kitchen wing, the hall would have served as a parlour. The house is now two storeys throughout.

The exterior shows an irregular three-window front fitted with 20th-century casements without glazing bars. The left end window blocks the former cow door, and the left first-floor window blocks the former hayloft loading hatch. The passage front doorway is left of centre and now occupied by a narrower 20th-century door. There remain traces of a 16th or 17th-century porch, once roofed by a large slab of granite. The main roof is gable-ended. The left end wall, facing the shippon, contains three slit windows to the livestock area, with the central one possibly serving as a dung hatch, though a larger window exists in the rear wall. A single vent slit opens to the former hayloft. The kitchen has similar fenestration to the front and is also gable-ended.

The interior contains elements from all the building's main historic phases. The earliest feature is a true cruck principal in the roof near the upper side of the passage, smoke-blackened from the original open hearth fire, though most of the truss was removed when the hall stack was inserted. This surviving fragment dates to the early 16th century. The rest of the main block roof structure was replaced around 1975. The inner room was probably the first to be floored; some timbers projecting into the hall might indicate the chamber originally jettied into it. The rubble crosswall at the upper end of the hall is a rebuild incorporating levelling timbers made from an old plank-and-muntin screen, possibly the original low partition.

The hall appears to have been floored in the mid or late 16th century, unusually early for this part of Devon. The crossbeam sits halfway between the inner room and passage, close to the chimney breast. Its soffit is richly moulded towards the upper end but only chamfered towards the passage. On the passage side, contemporary soffit-chamfered and step-stopped joists survive. Their arrangement and relationship with the chimney breast suggests that the present stack replaced a mid or late 16th-century smoke hood. The present large granite ashlar fireplace with hollow-chamfered surround therefore dates to the late 16th or early 17th century. On the lower side of the passage, there is no longer a crosswall. The hayloft crossbeam is roughly finished, and a granite tethering post survives at the end. The kitchen has a roughly-finished crossbeam and a granite fireplace with soffit-chamfered and step-stopped oak lintel and side ovens. The two-bay roof here is carried on a face-pegged jointed cruck truss.

The farmhouse stands in the attractive hamlet of Chapple, which contains several other listed buildings.