Garden Cottage

Garden Cottage, West Meon

A timber-framed cottage of 15th-century origin, dated by dendrochronology to 1441, with significant alterations spanning the 16th to 19th centuries.

The building began as a three-bay hall-house, originally constructed in the spring of 1441 using green oak timber. The main roof is thatched, hipped to the west and half-hipped to the east with eyebrow dormers. The timber frame is visible externally, with large and medium-sized panels infilled with painted brick nogging and some upper panels with plaster infill. The panel sizes reveal different phases of construction. The most distinctive features are substantial arched braces at the end elevations, indicating the extent of the original house. Windows are wooden casements of various sizes and styles. A mid-19th-century window lighting the kitchen features four lights with yellow glazing engraved with figures depicting Content, Industry, Confidence and Skill. An off-centre chimney stack stands on the ridge, rebuilt in the late 20th or early 20th century using some reclaimed old bricks. An early 19th-century single-storey brick extension extends to the east with a pitched slate roof and end stack.

The south elevation facing the garden has an off-centre glazed door to the main house and a half-glazed door to the extension. The north elevation has a further half-glazed door and wooden casements.

Interior features reveal the building's development clearly. The box-frame displays different construction methods including mortice and tenon joints and scarf joints, some pegged. Wattle and daub infill panels survive in places, notably in the west end wall. The original 15th-century hall, approximately 24 feet high at its apex, features massive arch braces, down braces and wind braces. The roof employs clasped purlins. A chimney was inserted into the former cross-passage, post-dating 1500 if not 1550. Constructed in brick, it has two back-to-back fireplaces with timber bressumers heating the living and dining rooms. Mortices in the cross-passage beam indicate where a 15th-century screen once stood, blocking drafts from entering the hall. The cross-passage beam is chamfered and stopped on its hall-facing side. Evidence remains of an internal cross-jetty extending over the dais at the high-status west end, with a chamfered bressumer on the hall-facing side. The room behind the dais was the original parlour with a first floor above. Flat sections of joists supporting a later first floor inserted into the hall suggest this work occurred before 1550.

Between approximately 1550 and 1650, the house underwent substantial modification: a chimney was inserted into the cross-passage, a first floor was inserted into the hall, and extensions were added to either end. A further single-storey extension was added in the early 19th century. Mid-19th-century alterations included the engraved kitchen window. Lewis records that builders of the new West Meon church were billeted at Garden Cottage in 1843–46, with the implication being that they were responsible for the engraved window, which depicts lively depictions of Content, Industry, Confidence and Skill.

The building was divided into two cottages from at least the late 19th century onwards, as shown in the 1884 first edition Ordnance Survey map (recorded as four units, with two larger central sections each with a smaller end bay; by 1909 the eastern end section had been reabsorbed into the east cottage). At the time of listing in 1967, it remained subdivided into two cottages, but by 1987 it had been reunited as a single dwelling.