Wells House Including Garden Wall And Well To South East

Wells House Including Garden Wall and Well to South East

Former farmhouse of complex medieval origins, substantially remodelled and extended during the 17th century with further alteration in the 19th century. The building is constructed of cob and stone, colourwashed and rendered, with a slate roof hipped at the left end of the main block and carried down as a hip over the wing at the right end.

The house now faces approximately east and displays a complex plan reflecting its prolonged evolution. It consists of a single-depth block on the left (south) with a two-storey rear addition of narrow service rooms. The right (north) end of the house presents particular complexity: it was originally roofed at right angles to the main block and projected beyond the rear (west) wall, but has since been truncated and re-roofed on a north-south axis over a late medieval roof running on a west-east axis. A larger room to the east is heated from a 19th or even 20th-century fireplace positioned back-to-back with a massive blocked granite fireplace in the narrow rear service room, possibly the late 16th or early 17th-century hall fireplace. This suggests the present east room was formerly a passage and lower end of the medieval house, with the present main block representing a 17th-century two-room parlour or kitchen wing added at right angles to the medieval house and subsequently extended by a probably 19th-century single-room addition at the left (south) end. The two-storey rear lean-to is likely also 19th-century, accommodating a kitchen on the ground floor.

The house is entered to the right of centre into a stair hall taken from the south room of the medieval house. A second stair with granite steps rises from the main block on the rear wall, contained within the two-storey rear block. A tiled lean-to occupies the right end.

The exterior presents two storeys with an asymmetrical 3+1 window front slightly set back at the right end. A front door with porch, roofed in slate and carried on a post, sits in the angle where the right end is set back. The fenestration consists of 20th-century two- and three-light casements with glazing bars, and a 20th-century French window at ground floor left.

Two chimneys in an axial stack and a front right corner stack rise from the main block; the wing also has an axial stack and front right corner stack, the axial stack featuring a granite shaft with tapering cap. A brick stack serves the rear outshut.

Interior details reveal considerable historical development. The front right room contains renewed ceiling timbers and a rebuilt fireplace, broken into the rear of a 16th or 17th-century granite stack with a blocked fireplace having chamfered granite jambs and granite lintel. The 17th-century main block to the left is now a single room (formerly two rooms) featuring chamfered scroll-stopped crossbeams (one boxed-in), an open fireplace reduced in size with stone rubble jambs and a 17th-century chamfered stopped lintel. A dog-leg granite stair with early 19th-century balusters rises from the rear wall, surmounted by a chamfered stopped timber lintel over the doorway. The extreme left-hand room is a 19th-century addition, its fireplace broken into the rear of the 17th-century stack.

The roof, not fully inspected at the time of survey in 1987, contains a single surviving cruck truss over the right end of the house, with feet visible in the ground floor rooms descending to the stone footings; the apex is reported to be smoke-blackened. Timbers over the main block, running at right angles to the sooted roof, are probably 17th-century, said to be pegged, of large scantling but not smoke-blackened.

A granite-capped garden wall lies to the east of the house, incorporating timber doors to a well facing the road and an iron pump on the garden side. The house possesses group value with an outbuilding to the north east and the walled garden to the north.