Lydart Farmhouse

Lydart Farmhouse

This farmhouse presents a complex building history disguised by 19th-century alterations to windows and roofing. It is built of roughcast rubble with roofs of blue slate featuring stone slate eaves courses, now partly replaced by concrete pantiles, and red brick chimneys.

The building has an L-shaped plan formed by two main phases of construction. The latest phase provides the present entrance front facing east: a 2-storey, 3-window range that is almost symmetrical with cut-down gable chimneys. Two doorways, positioned about 1 metre apart, occupy the centre. These have painted board doors and are sheltered by a single monopitched slated pentice canopy. The windows are small with segmental heads: at ground floor there is a 4-pane fixed window to the right and a 2-light casement to the left; at first floor, three similar casements are present, the third reportedly replacing a former granary doorway accessed by external steps. A corbelled chimney rises at the north gable.

The earlier phases of construction are best understood from the west elevation, which formerly faced the old road through the farmyard. This comprises two elements: a 16th-century single-unit range on an east-west axis built on the lowest part of the sloping site, incorporating an undercroft beneath two main floors; and a late 17th-century two-unit, two-storey wing at the east end projecting southward. The present front range backs against this earlier work.

The 16th-century element has walls approximately 86 centimetres thick with deeply splayed window openings. At its north-east corner, external spiral stone stairs descend to the undercroft, which contains five stop-chamfered beams. The raised ground floor includes an inserted partition creating a service room at the east end with two broad ceiling beams bearing bead moulding; the main room beyond has two boxed beams, and its west gable incorporates a semi-circular spiral staircase approximately 1 metre deep in the south-west corner, now fitted with replacement wooden stairs. The first-floor room above measures 6.4 metres by 3.9 metres and features on each end wall a large lozenge-shaped moulded plaster pattern in the form of geometrical strapwork with fleur-de-lys terminals (comparable in style to a ceiling in the Queen's Head at Monmouth). A room on a lower level immediately east, now a bathroom, contains a deep rectangular recess against the north wall with a cut-away in the ceiling beam above, apparently indicating a former doorway down to the level of the 17th-century wing.

The 17th-century element has a south gable wall approximately 120 centimetres thick. Its ground floor at the north end functions as a dairy. At first-floor level there are four stop-chamfered ceiling beams, and a wooden staircase leads to an attic with pegged collar trusses.

The west gable wall of the 16th-century range projects as a wing with gable coping, kneelers, and gable chimney. A plain doorway to the undercroft is flanked by massive footing boulders; the wall otherwise lacks openings. The south elevation displays one large square 19th-century 3-light window with horizontal glazing bars offset right at ground floor, and a 19th-century 2-light casement offset slightly left at first floor, featuring an old stone hoodmould—the only external feature indicating the true age of the house. The projecting second bay of the 17th-century wing contains a doorway with a board door and monopitched wooden canopy, a large rectangular window with modern 2-light glazing, a pair of wooden cross-windows at first floor, and a gable chimney. The north elevation shows the external walls of these elements apparently continuous but very irregularly fenestrated. The west half (16th-century element) has massive boulder footings, two narrow oblong openings to the undercroft (the left horizontal, the right vertical), a small square window above the former, and one 19th-century 2-light casement on each main floor to the right. The east half (north end of the 17th-century wing) features an oblong 3-light window and a square 2-light window at ground-floor level, and two small 19th-century 2-light casements at slightly different levels above.