St Olaves Cottage

A house, originally a gamekeeper's cottage, dating to the 17th century, with substantial rebuilding in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The walls are granite stone rubble, with a plastered top section which is likely cob; a granite stack has a plastered brick chimney shaft, and the roof is thatched with tiles to a rear outshot. The original layout was a three-room plan facing south. The left-hand end was used as a game store and gun room. The central room contains the only remaining evidence of the house’s 17th-century origins, with an axial stack backing onto that gun room. The house is two storeys high, with a secondary outshot to the rear of the right-hand room. The front has an irregular arrangement of 4 windows, with 20th-century casement windows without glazing bars. A ground-floor window on the left-hand side contains small diamond panes of leaded glass. Both the main door, positioned right of centre, and the door at the left-hand end to the game store/gun room, are 20th-century replacements. The roof is half-hipped at each end. A late 19th- to early 20th-century granite ashlar twin lancet window with sunken spandrels, flanking panelled pilasters and a moulded entablature is on the left-hand wall. Above it is a plain granite-mullioned window, both containing tiny diamond panes of leaded glass. Inside the central room, the axial beam is stop-chamfered with run-out stops, and there is a granite ashlar fireplace with a replacement oak lintel, which are likely original to the 17th century. All other interior details are from the 19th and 20th centuries. The roof was not inspected. St. Olaves Cottage is one of several attractive listed buildings in the hamlet.