Yellam

Yellam is a house and former farmhouse, probably dating from the late 15th or early 16th century, with major improvements made during the late 16th and 17th centuries and late 19th-century modernisation. It is constructed of whitewashed granite rubble with granite stacks and granite ashlar chimney shafts, and is roofed in thatch.

The building is a long structure built down a slope, facing north-west. It follows a 4-room-and-through-passage plan, with the inner room well terraced into the slope at the south-west end. It has a disused end stack. The hall contains an axial stack backing onto the passage. A shallow alcove projecting to the front left of the fireplace probably once housed a winder stair before a stair was later built in an outshot to the rear of the hall. On the lower side of the passage sits an unheated dairy with a corridor along the front leading to a parlour with an end stack. The present plan results from a major mid-17th-century refurbishment of an earlier house, and evidence suggests the earlier structure was a Dartmoor longhouse with a shippon (cattle shelter) in what are now the dairy and parlour, with the hall then open to the roof. The building is now two storeys with attics over the hall and inner room.

The exterior features an irregular 5-window front with 19th and 20th-century casements with glazing bars. The front passage doorway contains a 20th-century plank door behind a contemporary flat-roofed granite porch. The roof is gable-ended. The right end wall is blind, though it retains blocked small attic windows still containing their original oak frames, visible internally. The left end wall contains a small first-floor closet window—a 2-light casement with a flat-faced mullion and rectangular panes of leaded glass, probably dating from the 18th century.

Internally, most structural features date from the mid-17th-century refurbishment. However, the 4-bay roof section over the passage and lower end rooms (the putative shippon) is earlier, comprising true cruck trusses whose precise dating is impossible as the roofspace is inaccessible. The inner room axial beam has been replaced by a 20th-century RSJ, as has the fireplace lintel. The crosswall at the upper end of the hall is an oak plank-and-muntin screen, with muntins featuring central vertical recesses and chamfered edges with scroll-nick stops above bench level. A plain-chamfered crossbeam and granite fireplace are present. The stairs to the rear date from the late 19th century, possibly replacing the 17th-century original. The dairy crossbeam is a barely finished tree-trunk. The lower end parlour has a granite fireplace with soffit-chamfered oak lintel. Its crossbeam is plastered over with a moulded plaster cornice of late 17th or early 18th-century date. The roof over the hall and inner room was raised in the 17th century to accommodate the attics and comprises A-frame trusses with pegged lap-jointed collars with dovetail halvings. Several doors date from the 17th and 18th centuries, either of plank or panelled construction.

Yellam is an attractive and interesting farmhouse that appears to have been converted from a Dartmoor longhouse in the mid-17th century, with most structural detail from that period. The true cruck section indicates its earlier origins, and other earlier features may survive behind later plaster.