Nant Pasgan-mawr

Nant Pasgan-mawr

A long, low building retaining hall-house proportions, with in-line extensions to each gable end. The structure is built of roughly coursed rubble stone on projecting boulder footings, with a slate roof. Three fine chimneys mark the original gable ends and the north-east gable; all have drip-stones and traces of over-sailing caps. The doorway is off-set to the left of centre, featuring a fine voussoir-headed archway. Windows flank the door (2-pane sashes in earlier openings), with 3 catslide dormers reconstructed in the later 20th century positioned above, not quite aligned. Three small windows on the rear elevation—the central one aligned with the entrance and probably replacing an earlier cross-passage doorway. The extension against the north-east gable has a single dormer window and a doorway in the gable end. A loft doorway at the rear is accessed by a rebuilt external staircase. The south-west extension has a doorway in its front elevation and a wide pitching door to the upper rear. A lean-to against the rear, a later addition, probably served as a cattle shelter.

The house is structurally articulated by two pairs of collared cruck trusses embedded in the stone walls and carried on slightly projecting pad-stones. The trusses have pronounced elbows, with the hall truss seated higher in the wall than the truss between hall and service end. Cross-beams supporting the ceiling lie alongside the trusses but are not jointed into them. The roof has two tiers of purlins; the upper lie directly on the cruck-blades, while the lower purlins are supported on short spurs above the blades.

The house retains significant elements of its early arrangement despite loss of the partition between hall and service end. Mortices in the beam between service end and hall passage indicate that the service end was once divided into three small units—possibly parlour, buttery, and stair. A trimmer beam for a staircase survives, and evidence of a small fireplace suggests one room was a small parlour. Hall and service end are differentiated by ceiling detail: the hall (including passage bay) has chamfered joists, while the service end has plain joists. The hall fireplace bay now lacks a ceiling, but slots for joists are clearly visible in the central cross-beam and in a further beam set just forward of the chimney, suggesting the fireplace in its present form may not be primary. A staircase stands alongside the hall stack. The hall fireplace has a chamfered timber bressumer; inset within it is a bread oven and grate with a round-headed archway through a smoke-screen wall, a crane, and an ash-pit. A substantial fireplace with a similar bressumer serves the first floor chamber over the service end. Slots in the collar of the truss at this end indicate the position of a partition delineating a first floor chamber.

The addition against the south-west gable has a flue in its rear corner, perhaps once serving a wash-boiler or drying kiln.

The house retains its context amongst small fields, with the remains of several field cow-houses visible nearby.