Cross Tree Cottage Including Front Area Railings

Cross Tree Cottage is a house, originally two cottages but now combined into one, dating to approximately the early 18th century, with a rear wing added around the mid-19th century. The construction is stuccoed granite rubble, likely with light scantling timber framing to the first floor, which is also stuccoed. The roof is covered in asbestos slate, with a gable end to the left, abutting an adjoining building, and a hipped roof to the right. A gable end is present on the rear wing. A rendered axial stack is located behind the ridge.

The house has two principal front rooms, one on either side of a central lobby entrance served by the axial stack. Stairs are situated behind the stack, and there are small service rooms at the rear, under a two-storey lean-to. A kitchen wing was added around the mid-19th century to the rear of the right-hand room. A two-storey porch was added later in the 19th or early 20th century, replacing an earlier two-storey porch with Gothic windows, as documented in photographs from around 1860 and 1880 held at Bowing Library in Moretonhampstead.

The front of the house has a three-window range. The windows are 19th-century sashes without glazing bars, with the first floor windows set in exposed moulded cases. The ground floor on the right has a larger, late 19th-century two-light casement window. The central doorway has a late 19th or early 20th-century two-storey, whitewashed brick gabled porch, with the first floor jettied on shaped wooden corbels to the front, and featuring applied sham timber framing, moulded bargeboards, and a wooden finial. The front door is an early 18th-century double door, with four panels each, consisting of two small center panels side by side, above a larger top and bottom panel, and with side windows.

Inside, the right-hand ground floor room has a roughly chamfered ceiling beam and a 20th-century fireplace. The left-hand room has a blocked fireplace with 20th-century chimney pieces. Two-panel doors are located on the ground floor at the rear. The framed staircase behind the stack has an early 18th-century balustrade on the upper flight, with a closed string, heavy turned balusters, a square handrail with moulded capping, butted up to square newels moulded at the corners and with ball finials; the bottom flight has been replaced. The first floor has simple 18th-century fireplaces with moulded cornices and architraves, along with small panelled pot-cupboards to the side. Two early 18th-century first-floor doors are constructed from planks and rails to simulate a panelled appearance, and another 18th-century two-panel door is also present on the first floor.

The front garden area includes 19th-century railings with shafts shaped like fleur-de-lis or spearheads, and baluster stanchions set in a granite plinth. Cross Tree Cottage possesses interesting early 18th-century internal joinery, and its exterior, which has undergone little alteration since the 19th century, contributes to the group value of listed buildings in Cross Street.