Lewis Hill

Lewis Hill is a house of late 15th-century origins with substantial late 16th-century remodelling and significant 20th-century renovations. It is constructed of whitewashed rendered cob with a thatched roof, hipped at the left end and at the end of the rear wing. The building has an axial stack with a granite ashlar shaft projecting from the front, and a lateral stack with a similar shaft.

The house comprises a main range three rooms wide, formerly with a through passage, together with a rear kitchen wing and a right-hand cross wing that was formerly partly used as a hay barn. The early core is a high-status medieval open hall house, probably originally divided by low screens. The hall was floored over in several phases, beginning with the inner room, which was provided with a fine first-floor chamber featuring an ornamental plaster ceiling and a contemporary fireplace served by the front lateral stack. A two-storey porch may also date from this phase. The hall itself was later fitted with a stack inserted backing onto the through passage and a granite newel stair adjacent to the stack. The function of the cross wing is uncertain. Remains of a cobbled floor indicate an internal open drainage system, and there is a truncated cob stack on the right-hand wall. The rear kitchen wing may be an 18th-century addition. Substantial restoration work was carried out in the 20th century, including refenestration.

The house is two storeys high with an irregular four-window front to the main range. The right-hand end has a slightly higher roofline and a two-storey gabled porch to the left of centre marking the former passage. The fenestration comprises 20th-century artificial stone mullioned windows of one, two, three and four lights, with two first-floor gabled dormers and one transomed stair window to the left of the porch.

The interior contains a number of individually outstanding features. Two arched brace jointed cruck trusses with wind braces are visible on the first floor, one with a brace missing. The jointed crucks are neatly pegged with five-face pegs. Smoke-blackening is reported to extend the full length of the hall and inner room. The cambered lintel of the inner doorway of the porch may be medieval.

A notable 16th-century decorated plaster ceiling survives in the first-floor room to the right. A moulded cornice is carried round the principals, with rustic animal motifs in the centre divided by foliage stem ribs. A former fireplace had a stylistically similar overmantel, fragments of which have been reused as the overmantel of the room below. This room has a fireplace with a replaced lintel but rare surviving chequered plasterwork on the internal walls of the hearth. The cross beam and two half beams in this room are particularly fine, ovolo-moulded with moulded bar step stops. The open hall fireplace has one granite monolith and one stone rubble jamb with a chamfered stopped lintel. The adjacent newel stair has granite steps. An oak plank and muntin screen on the other side of the stack partitions the hall from the former passage. The outer doorway of the porch has an ovolo-moulded lintel.

The fireplace in the cross wing has a chamfered timber lintel carried down onto stone rubble jambs. A section of cobbles in front of this fireplace includes evidence of an open stone drain which formerly ran diagonally across the floor of the wing. The 20th-century joinery is of high quality.

This is an important medieval house with some notable later features.