Vete Mill Farmhouse Including Garden Walls To South

Farmhouse. Probably dating from the 17th century, with possible earlier elements, and renovated around 1980. The structure is built of plastered cob on stone rubble footings, featuring stone rubble stacks topped with 20th-century brick and a thatched roof. The house follows a 4-room-and-through-passage plan, built down a hillslope and facing south. The western end has an inner room with a gable-end stack, while the hall has a large axial stack backing onto the passage. A 19th-century staircase connects the hall and inner room. The lower section of the passage (now divided as a self-contained cottage) originally included a kitchen with an axial stack, and an adjacent room that seems to have been a shippon or agricultural store, extensively renovated in the 20th century. The plan suggests a possible late medieval open hall house, potentially resembling a Dartmoor longhouse, although other local longhouses are complete mid-17th century rebuilds. A secondary, single-storey woodshed projects forward at a right angle, overlapping the lower left end. A 20th-century kitchen extension is located at the rear of the hall. The exterior presents an irregular 6-window front of 20th-century casement windows with glazing bars, including a French window to the inner room. The sloping ground is emphasized by the hall and inner room section’s greater height and larger windows. The roof steps down from left to right. The front passage doorway is centrally located, behind a contemporary gabled porch with shaped bargeboards and a late 19th-century door. There's a cottage doorway to the right. The roof is gable-ended on the left and half-hipped on the right. A blocked first-floor opening in the right end wall may have been a hayloft loading hatch, though the 20th-century conversion has obscured or removed evidence of its earlier use as a shippon. Internally, all visible features date back to the 17th century. The passage includes a timber joist ledge behind the stack, a large granite rubble fireplace with a soffit-chamfered oak lintel, a tall ceiling, and a soffit-chamfered crossbeam with run-out stops. A similar crossbeam is also present in the inner room, where the fireplace was inserted or rebuilt in the 19th century. The roof is inaccessible, but the bases of large-scantling straight principals suggest a surviving 17th-century A-frame truss roof. The lower end cottage's kitchen contains a soffit-chamfered crossbeam, a large fireplace with an oak lintel and side oven, and a roof which may be older than the remainder of the house.