Little Zephyr, Zephyr Cottage And Attached Boundary Walls To South East

Pair of houses with garden boundary walls on Lydiate Lane, Lynton. Possibly 17th century in origin, largely rebuilt in the early 19th century. Rendered walls with slate roofs, partly replaced in asbestos slate.

The buildings consist of two symmetrical 2-storey cottages arranged as a 3+3-window range. Each is a 2-room cottage with a centre hall and stair, and a rear service wing. Old Garden Cottage (No. 24) features 2-light 8-pane casements with thin mullions above a 10-pane casement and a French door with margin-panes. A trellised gabled porch is centred on the front elevation and contains a wide door with glazed upper part including margin-panes. The gable facing the road is plain with a large external stack, the upper part in brick. At the rear is a wing with a very wide gable containing plain plate-glass sashes. The rear slope and wing have asphalted slates.

West Cottage, to the right, is generally not accessible but follows a similar format to Old Garden Cottage with 2-light casements to the first floor and asbestos-cement slate roofing. Its rear features a wide gabled extension and a large eaves stack that is slate-hung but retains some early brickwork, probably 18th century, in the upper part.

The interior of Old Garden Cottage shows alterations and adaptation over time. The ground floor right room has later inserted French doors with full-height shutters and a 19th-century fire surround with pilasters and paterae containing the original cast-iron grate. The left-hand room has been subdivided to form a passageway to the rear and contains a corner shell cupboard. The rear kitchen has a very low ceiling, less than 2 metres high, and contains 19th-century two-plank doors. The two front bedrooms have coved ceilings and 2-panel doors on L-hinges. A passage behind these rooms leads to a now-closed doorway into the adjoining property.

The subsidiary features include a high rubble boundary wall on the side adjacent to Lydiate Lane, with on-edge coping stones reaching the eaves of the cottage. This wall follows the slope of the lane down to its junction with Queen Street, where it terminates in an unclosed end without quoins. Near the front is a plank door. Across the back of both properties is a further wall enclosing a paved yard at a lower level than the adjoining access way. This is constructed in thin-bedded rubble with rough weathered coping and contains iron access gates to the lane.

Although remodelled in the 19th century, these cottages are claimed to date from 1680. The small scale and low ceiling heights, particularly to the rear, support this possibility, as does their location near the centre of the old settlement in Lynton. The houses are largely concealed from the roads by the high wall and surrounding properties. Early Ordnance maps show them as sharing one common garden area, now subdivided. The first-floor linking door between the properties indicates shared ownership at some stage.