Paper Mill Cottage

Paper Mill Cottage is a house dating from the early 16th century or earlier, with early 17th-century alterations and later additions, and a restoration from around 1980. It features a timber frame, nibblestone, and brick construction, topped with a pantile roof. The building is two storeys high and consists of four bays.

The west front has a nibblestone dwarf wall that supports a close-studded timber frame, which is rendered on the ground floor. There is a 20th-century board door in the second bay with a small window to its right. The other windows are mostly 20th-century two- or three-light side-sliding sashes, situated in former openings. The timber frame on the first floor has a wall plate spliced at either side of the first bay and removed from part of the second bay, with a mid rail higher in the third bay, and braces connecting the two left-hand posts to the eaves plate. The roof is hipped at the right end, with a brick stack at the left end and another at the ridge above the door.

The left return is made of stone with quoins on the right, while the right return is brick on a nibblestone base, and the rear aisle is clad in later brick. Inside, the timber frame is well-preserved, featuring four trusses with jowelled posts braced to wall plates and tie beams, although some braces have been removed. The sooted rafters suggest the original presence of an open hall. The early 17th-century groove-decorated plank and muntin panelling is found on both floors between the central and right-hand cells.

The central room includes an Inglenook fireplace with a salt cupboard, a chamfered bressummer, and a cyma-stopped chamfered headpost on a padstone. Renewed timber framing of the front wall is visible in the Inglenook, along with chamfered joists. The left-hand room features another large Inglenook with a spice cupboard, a cambered broach-stopped bressummer, and a recreated aisle wall, as well as moulded joists. Some panelling has been removed from the rear of the first-floor right-hand bays, and a wattle and daub partition wall has been taken out from between the two first-floor left-hand bays. The roof was originally thatched.