Pumpy Cottage

Pumpy Cottage is a cottage, part of what was once a larger farmhouse, dating to the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Significant alterations were made in the mid-16th and 17th centuries, and the building was reduced in size to its current form, likely in the 19th century. It is constructed of granite stone rubble with stone stacks; the hall stack retains its original granite ashlar chimneyshaft, and the roof is covered in slate, formerly thatched.

Originally, the building was part of a three-room-and-through-passage medieval house, possibly a Dartmoor longhouse, built down a hillslope. The two rooms visible today represent the original hall and inner room. The inner room has a gable-end stack, and the hall originally had an axial stack backing onto a passage (part of which remains in a lean-to). A garage and store rooms occupy the site of the original shippon. The original farmhouse had open-roofed rooms divided by low partitions and heated by an open hearth. In the mid-16th century, the inner room was floored and a jettied chamber was created projecting over the upper end of the hall. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the hall stack was inserted and the hall was floored. The cottage is now two storeys high, with a 20th-century kitchen extension at the rear.

The front of the cottage has a regular two-window arrangement with 20th-century casement windows and glazing bars, and a gable-ended roof. A C20 plank door is within the lean-to, serving as the entrance to the former passage.

Inside, a stone rubble crosswall at the upper end of the hall may be a surviving low partition from the original layout. An oak round-headed doorframe is believed to date to the late 15th or early 16th century. The late 16th/early 17th-century fireplace has a granite ashlar surround with hollow-chamfered edges, and now contains a 19th-century oven. A contemporary axial beam has plain soffit chamfers, and the corresponding joists are also soffit-chamfered. The inner room has plain joists, and the stack there appears to be a 19th-century addition. The original roof structure includes two face-pegged jointed cruck trusses with cambered collars and small triangular yokes—a type L1 as defined by A. Lockwood. Both trusses show smoke-blackening from the original open hearth fire. A wattle-and-daub crosswall separating the hall and inner room chambers is smoke-blackened on the hall side only. A series of holes drilled into the underside of the collar and principals of the roof truss near the hall chimneybreast are present, potentially indicating a smoke bay existed before the hall stack was built.

Pumpy Cottage is located within the straggling hamlet of East Week, which contains several other listed buildings.