Brownings Cottage

Brownings Cottage is a small cottage of 17th century or earlier origins, situated on the east side of Briton Street Lane in Dunsford. It represents a rare survival of a single-storey carpenter's shop with a small adjoining 17th-century cottage, and is one of three early houses on this stretch of the lane leading to Dunsford village centre.

The building is constructed of whitewashed rendered cob on stone rubble footings, with an asbestos slate roof (formerly thatched) gabled at the ends. It features a left-end stack and an axial stack. The building is single storey to the left, rising to two storeys at the centre and right. The irregular two-window front has no first-floor windows. To the right of the axial stack, the roof is brought down as a pentice over a cambered chamfered doorframe with a plank and cover strip front door. To the right of this door, the half-room is slightly advanced and clad with weatherboarding. To the left, a half-glazed 20th-century front door opens into the former carpenter's shop, flanked by two-light casements of four panes per light; the right-hand casement lights the hall.

The present plan preserves what was originally a carpenter's shop at the left end with an adjacent small single-depth cottage at the right end. The cottage contains two rooms. The principal room is a hall to the left, heated by a stack backing onto a cross entry with opposed front and rear doors. This cross entry may originally have been a passage, and the right-hand partition is missing. The hall contains a winder stair against the rear wall in line with the stack. To the right of the cross entry is a small room that may have been a store. The former carpenter's shop at the left end is now used as a sitting room but remains single storey; it may be a later addition to the cottage, though a pegged doorway between the cottage and shop suggests it is probably no later than the 18th century. It likely had a separate entrance on the front before the present 20th-century door was inserted.

Alterations were carried out in the 1950s, when the thatch was replaced and the eaves were subsequently raised.

The interior contains considerable survival of 17th-century carpentry and joinery for such a small building. The hall fireplace has been partly blocked by a 20th-century grate, but retains a chamfered timber lintel resting on a stone rubble jamb at the front wall. A chamfered half-beam with bar stops in front of the stack may indicate a jetty. A similar half-beam stands against the wall between the hall and carpenter's shop. The lintel over the doorway into the hall between the stack and stair is chamfered and stopped. A chamfered doorway with step stops on the first floor leads into the right-hand first-floor room. A large chamfered cross beam marks the right-hand side of the cross entry. The half-room has exposed joists. The hall contains a large semi-circular projecting bread oven to the axial stack. No access to the roofspace was available at the time of survey in 1985, and no principal rafters are visible in the first-floor rooms, suggesting they have been replaced.