St Michael'S Cottage

St Michael's Cottage comprises a row of three cottages (Nos. 1, 2 and 3) at Ilsington, which was originally the church house. Built in the early 16th century and restored in 1938, the building is constructed of a mixture of slatestone and granite rubble with large dressed granite block quoins and granite details. The roof is slated.

The building is two storeys high with a five-window front. Three granite chimneystack project from the walls: a large one with offsets and tapered top from the front wall off centre to the left; a large ashlar stack with tapered top on the right-hand gable; and a smaller stack with tapered top on the left-hand gable.

The windows are early 20th-century wood casements with 6 or 8 panes per light. The ground storey features moulded granite doorways with 4-centred arches. No. 2 has the original entrance to the hall with carved spandrels. To its right, No. 3 has a chamfered granite doorway with a 4-centred arch, the original entrance to the kitchen. At the left end, No. 1 has a doorway with a 4-centred arch, probably a 19th-century insertion. A continuous stringcourse runs at sill-level across the second storey, stopping just short of the former doorway at the right-hand end, now converted into a window with a moulded granite surround and 4-centred arch. The rear wall facing the churchyard has casement windows matching those at the front. The original rear doorway, opposite the front door of No. 2, has a chamfered granite surround with a segmental arch but is now blocked with a window inserted. At the north end, behind No. 1, is a shallow projection rising to eaves level with a pent roof of stone slabs, possibly a former garderobe.

The original plan almost certainly had three rooms on the ground storey with opposing front and back doors at the right-hand end of the central hall, with no evidence of a through-passage. No. 1 now occupies the inner room and upper end of the hall, No. 2 the rest of the hall, and No. 3 the kitchen. The upper storey probably originally consisted of a single long room entered by an outside staircase at the right-hand end of the front wall. There is evidence of an internal staircase beside the kitchen stack and a shallow projection behind the inner room that may have been a garderobe.

The interior reveals the original hall, now subdivided, with the main part in the two ground storey rooms of No. 2 and the remainder in the right-hand room of No. 1. The hall has broad chamfered upper-floor beams with run-out and straight-cut stops, and chamfered joists with step-stops. Above the left-hand end-wall in No. 1 is the head-beam of a plank-and-muntin screen with hollow and three-quarter-round mouldings; the studs appear to have been removed. The front wall at No. 2 contains a large blocked fireplace with a wooden lintel. The inner room in No. 1 has plain joists running lengthways with no beam and a small gable fireplace with a mutilated wood lintel. The former kitchen in No. 3 has been subdivided and features upper floor beams similar to those in the hall but with plain joists. It has a very wide, deep gable fireplace, mostly blocked, with a cambered and chamfered wood lintel with a relieving arch above it following the line of the camber. No visible features are apparent in the upper storey. The roof comprises 10 side-pegged jointed-cruck trusses, including two gable trusses, with butt purlins and cranked collars. The top of the curved part of the cruck projects slightly and is rounded. It is not possible to determine if the ridge-piece is original. There is no evidence of original partitions or smoke-blackening.

The building was converted into a Poor House in the 18th century and sold by the Parish for conversion into private dwellings in 1839.