49, New Street

The property at 49 New Street, Chagford is a house dating back to the 16th century, with significant alterations in the late 16th and 17th centuries. It is constructed of plastered granite with a granite stack featuring granite ashlar and a 20th-century brick top, and has a slate roof, formerly thatched.

The original plan appears to have been a 3-room-and-through-passage house, similar to neighboring properties. The central room was knocked through to create a carriageway, and the original passage area is now the smaller left-hand room. A service room was later divided off to become numbers 53 and 55 New Street. The original house was likely built in the 16th century, potentially as a hall house. It is now two storeys throughout.

The exterior has a late 19th-century appearance, with 4-pane sash windows on the ground floor and casement windows with glazing bars on the first floor, and a small stair window centrally located halfway up the left side of the building. Double doors mark the carriageway entrance. The roof runs parallel to the street and abuts the adjacent buildings.

The interior is noteworthy, although only limited access was available for inspection. The hall features a granite ashlar fireplace with an oak lintel, the underside of which is cambered. An oak, shoulder-headed doorway leads to the former passage room. There’s a doorway to the newel stair to the left of the fireplace. A rubble partition rises to first-floor level at the upper end of the hall. The central room (now the carriageway) has axial joists that cantilever over the crosswall, with rounded ends projecting into the hall and supporting the bressumer of a jettied inner room. The hall was later floored over, likely in the 17th century, with soffit-chamfered axial beams and joists, which are soffit-chamfered with straight cut stops. It is suspected, based on neighboring properties, that the roof may have a cruck truss structure, blackened by smoke.