Beacon Cottage

Beacon Cottage is a cottage that forms part of a larger house, dating from the late 16th century to early 17th century, with possible earlier origins. It was refurbished in the late 19th century when a larger house was divided into cottages. The building features plastered granite, possibly with cob, a granite stack topped with 20th-century brick, and a thatch roof.

The cottage has a small two-room plan and is situated in a terrace along the roadside, facing southwest. The larger room at the right end has an end stack that backs onto the adjoining property. It is likely a fragment of a 16th or 17th-century two or three-room-and-through-passage plan, but the specific part it represents is unclear due to late 19th-century plaster covering the evidence. The adjoining cottages appear to have been rebuilt during the subdivision. The cottage is two storeys tall.

The exterior features a two-window front that is not entirely symmetrical, containing 19th and 20th-century casements with glazing bars. The largest window on the ground floor right was created by removing the mullions of a late 16th to early 17th-century granite window, with the moulded reveals and hoodmould still visible, although the initials carved on the labels are illegible. The doorway, slightly left of centre, has a 20th-century plank door. The roof runs between those of the adjoining houses.

The interior was not available for inspection at the time of the survey. No carpentry detail is visible on the ground floor, but the roof is believed to be original, featuring massive curving timbers that suggest some form of cruck or possibly arch-braced trusses.

South Zeal is notable as one of the few medieval boroughs in Devon, where many 16th and 17th-century houses still survive to varying degrees.