Middle Bonehill Farmhouse, Including Garden Wall In Front Of Right Hand Side Of House

This is a longhouse, likely dating to the 16th or 17th century, with possible earlier origins, and an addition of 1682, along with later alterations. A lean-to structure was added to the front of a shippon. The older part of the house is rendered with roughcast, while the shippon is built of exposed, coursed granite rubble, and later additions are also of granite rubble. The roof of the main house section is covered with tarred slates, while the 1682 wing has a thatched roof, half-hipped at the front. The shippon’s lower end is also half-hipped, with corrugated asbestos roofing, and the lean-to has corrugated iron. The main house has a substantial granite ashlar chimney stack with thatch weatherings and a tapered top, originally serving the hall fireplace. A smaller granite stack, probably 19th century, is located on the right-hand gable. The original layout was a 3-room plan with a through-passage, the shippon occupying the room to the left of the passage. A porch and a small room to the right of it were added in 1682. The house is two stories high, and the main section, including the porch wing, has three windows across the front. Most windows are 19th-century wood casements with two or three panes per light. A ground-floor window on the right-hand side has a lintel indicating a former three-light stone-mullioned window. The windows in the 1682 wing have flat arches with roughly cut voussoirs. The porch doorway is elaborately moulded granite with a round arch, with the spandrels carved with the initials 'IS' and the date 1682. An old plank door with wrought-iron strap hinges sits behind the porch. A projection in the left wall of the porch contains a water trough carved from a single piece of granite, with a small hole at its base for an outlet pipe. A small doorway with a plain granite lintel and plank door leads into the shippon, to the left of the porch. The shippon's gable-end has three ventilation slits at ground-story level and a fourth at the top of the wall. Two small openings resembling putlog holes are halfway up the wall. The lean-to in front of the shippon appears to have been an early 19th-century pigsty, divided into three compartments by low walls constructed from large, upright pieces of slate. Each compartment has a doorway with a plain granite lintel, two at the front and one on the right-hand side, each with a plank door and wrought-iron strap-hinges. Inside each compartment is a feeding trough carved from a single piece of granite. The garden wall in front of the house is constructed of large-scale granite rubble. The interior of the house has not been inspected, but the former hall appears to have a large open fireplace and a late 16th or early 17th-century panelled seat against the wall facing the fireplace. The shippon contains an old drain down the middle and feeding-trough stones along each long wall. Roof timbers are of 18th or early 19th-century date.