25 And 27, Long Street

This is a house, originally two dwellings, dating from the early 17th century, with extensions and alterations from the 18th, mid-19th, and late 20th centuries. It is built of rendered cob, with an asbestos tile roof featuring gabled ends and a half-hipped rear wing. The house has stone axial and gable-end stacks, with the left gable-end stack rebuilt in red brick and the left gable-end retaining a stone stack with weathering.

The original early 17th-century house, now occupied by No. 27, has a two-room plan. The smaller, unheated room on the southwest side is occupied by No. 25, while a larger hall or kitchen occupies the northeast side, containing a blocked gable-end fireplace with a smoking chamber or drying kiln to the side, and a projecting stair turret on the front. Alternatively, No. 27 might have been the lower end of a larger three-room house with a through-passage, the high end now No. 25. No. 25 was remodelled into a two-room plan house with a central entrance passage leading to a stairhall behind the left room, and featuring a 17th-century single-room plan wing at the rear. 18th and 19th-century outshuts were added to the rear of the main range, and a late-20th-century single-storey extension was built on the front.

The south-east front is asymmetrical with five windows. The right-hand range is a three-window, one-and-a-half-storey section with a main roof extending over the projecting stair turret, which has a small casement window. The centre has a three-light window with wrought-iron casement, and two dormers with casements featuring horizontal glazing bars. A late-20th-century flat-roofed single-storey extension is on the left. To the left is a two-storey, two-bay range with late-19th-century three-light casements with glazing bars on the ground floor, 20th-century casements on the first floor, and a central doorway. The northeast gable end has a plank door and a small metal casement window on the first floor. The rear north-west has the main range roof continued over lean-to outshuts and a wing with a half-hipped roof.

Inside No. 27, there are chamfered cross-beams with run-out stops, a blocked fireplace in the former kitchen/hall with a large timber bressumer, and a doorway leading to what appears to be a drying kiln or smoking chamber. There is a reused 17th-century carved panel door. A 17th-century doorway leads to the stair turret, and a doorway in the partition between the attic chambers has a cranked head. A jointed cruck truss with trenched purlins is present, and the attics are ceiled. No. 25, the right-hand room formerly part of No. 27, has a chamfered half-beam, a blocked rear doorway to an outshut with a heavy frame and cambered head. The rooms to the left of No. 25 have 19th-century joinery, including panelled doors and a staircase with stick balusters, while the rear wing has deeply chamfered cross-beams. This is an interesting early 17th-century house with later remodelling, largely unaltered in the 20th century aside from the late-20th-century front extension.