The Exmoor Sandpiper Inn

The Exmoor Sandpiper Inn is a house, now an inn, dating from the early to mid-17th century, and possibly incorporating an earlier core. It was extended and possibly partly rebuilt in the late 18th or early 19th century, with further additions in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The exterior is painted coursed stone rubble with gable-ended Welsh slate roofs. A rear range of the late 19th century is clad in slate hanging, and there are more recent 20th-century wings rendered over an unknown material.

The original 17th-century plan consisted of two rooms: a hall with a large external stone stack to the front, and a lower room to the right with a rear stack. A porch at the centre likely originally led to a cross or through-passage. A late 18th/early 19th-century addition was built to the left, possibly incorporating or replacing a former inner room. This addition has a rear stack to the right-hand room and a former end stack to the left-hand room, with a staircase rising from the main entrance. A parallel range was added to the rear around 1800, with late 20th-century cross wings flanking it. The building may be a remodelling of a medieval open hall, although no evidence of this was noted during a 1987 survey when roof access was denied.

The 17th-century part to the right is a three-window range. It has 19th-century two-light wooden casements, those on the ground floor with painted brick segmental heads. A large off-centre stack features offsets and a projecting bread oven with a slate cap. A central 19th-century gabled porch sits in the angle of the stack, with a boarded door. The circa 1800 range to the left is set back slightly. It has a 1:3 window range with 19th-century two and three-light wooden casements, a left-of-centre entrance with a boarded door and a gabled porch with a round-arched opening, and a two-leaf boarded door at the right-hand end of the front.

The former hall (the left-hand room in the 17th-century range) contains a large open stone fireplace with an ovolo-moulded wooden lintel and a bread oven. The right-hand room has a pair of chamfered cross beams and a fireplace with a reused wooden lintel. Chamfered beams in the ground-floor room to the left of the hall suggest that it is a rebuilding of a former inner room. First-floor rooms and the roofspace were not inspected. The inn was formerly known as The Blue Ball Inn.