West Fingle Farmhouse

Farmhouse. Dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, it was renovated in 1986. The external walls are plastered cob on stone rubble footings, with the lower end rebuilt using 20th-century concrete blocks. There is a disused cob hall stack, and the lower end stack has been rebuilt in concrete blocks. The roof is thatched.

The building has an L-shape. The main block faces northwest and is built on a gentle slope, displaying a three-room-and-through-passage plan, with an unheated inner room at the uphill end to the right. There’s an axial stack in the hall, backing onto the former through passage. The service end room has a projecting end stack, inserted or rebuilt in 1986.

The hall seems to have originally been open, possibly with an open hearth fire. The hall fireplace was likely inserted in the late 16th or early 17th century, and the main house was progressively floored over between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries. A dairy block, likely dating to the 17th or 18th century, projects at right angles in front of the inner room, overlapping the hall and incorporating the newel staircase from the upper end of the hall. A thorough 1986 renovation, which essentially involved a near-complete rebuild, removed evidence that it might have once been a Dartmoor longhouse. The farmhouse is now two storeys throughout.

On the front, the inner room and most of the hall are hidden behind the dairy block. The front features single 20th-century casement windows with glazing bars on each floor. The passage front doorway is boarded up. The rear also has 20th-century casements with glazing bars, and the passage rear doorway is blocked. Both the main block and dairy block have gable-ended roofs.

During a partial inspection, the hall contained an upper end oak plank-and-muntin screen, with chamfered muntins featuring step stops designed to accommodate a bench below. There is a blocked 19th-century grate in the hall fireplace. A crossbeam has broad soffit-chamfers with large step stops. The lower passage partition has been removed and service end crossbeams have been replaced by 20th-century rolled steel joists (RSJs). This section displays an early to mid-17th century roof with A-frame trusses, pegged lap-jointed collars, and dovetail halvings. The remainder of the roof and the dairy block were not inspected.