Bridge Cottage

Built using local materials

Bridge Cottage is typical of the kind of building which must always have existed in Peppercombe. Smallholders' and labourers' cottages were built of the local materials most easily available, and developed over the centuries from humble single-storeyed dwellings into decent two-storeyed cottages such as we have here. The materials most readily to hand were rubble stone, cob (mud mixed with straw) and thatch, and it is of these that Bridge Cottage is built, with brick for the chimneys, made as tall as possible to provide a draft in this sheltered place.

The valley at Peppercombe

Peppercombe is a steep and wooded valley, through which a stream runs down to a meadow before tumbling to a beach in a fine waterfall. There is a sloping path for you to reach the shore. The cliffs here are particularly dramatic, formed from an outcrop of red Triassic stone, with the whole magnificent North Devon coast line curving away in both directions and Lundy on the horizon. When this wild and lovely valley was acquired by the National Trust in 1988, we took on this and Castle Bunglow, further down the coombe.

Inside, the floorboards of the upper floor form the ceiling of the lower, left visible from below in a building tradition surviving from the Middle Ages.  There is evidence in the wall heads that at some stage these had been heightened to provide better headroom upstairs, but otherwise the cottage is little altered.  The ground floor is arranged in the universal manner, found in cottages throughout the country, with regional variations.

The central front door opens into the kitchen, which is the larger of two downstairs rooms.  The end wall is occupied by the large fireplace, on which, before a range was fitted, most of the cooking would have been done over the open fire, in a series of specially-designed pots, either self-supporting, with legs, or able to stand on a trivet; to the left is the bread oven, and on the other side is the corner recess in which the fuel, usually brushwood or furze, would once have been piled.

The inner room is also heated, and there is no sign that the chimney is an addition.  It must always have been a parlour, therefore, showing this to have been a house of good quality.  Often the inner room of a cottage was a storeroom, or a bedroom, unheated like the rooms upstairs.  On the other hand, the parlour here was not the precious, seldom-visited sanctum that is described by some writers on rural life in the last century.  The stairs lead out of it, and off it were the back-kitchen, or larder, and the wash-house, which would more normally open out of the kitchen itself.

Further evidence that this was more than the simplest labourer's cottage is shown by the large wash-house or laundry, with capacity to absorb more than a single family's clothing.  One 19th-century wife must have taken in washing to add to the family income.

At the turn of the century, Bridge Cottage was the home of the Hockin family, who had nine children.  One of their daughters married Mr Smales, who lived on the other side of the valley, and farmed the site of the Castle for about fifty years, from 1918.  Another daughter, Mrs Packington, later came back with her husband to live in Bridge Cottage for many years, the last person to do so.  Stephen Smales, who owns the garage in Horns Cross, and his sister, Mrs Eileen Tucker, remember frequent visits to their aunt and uncle, who had no children of their own and therefore made much of their Smales nephews and nieces.  The cottage and its garden were beautifully kept, although of course there was no electricity and minimal plumbing. Mrs Packington finally moved out of the cottage in the 1970s, to live with her niece until her death in her 99th year. 

To read the full history album for Bridge Cottage please click here.

To download the children's Explorer pack for Bridge Cottage please click here.

When the Landmark Trust agreed to take on the building, the first priority was to make it weather proof, and at the same time vandal proof.  This work was put underway early in 1989.  The roof was stripped of its old thatch. The frame underneath was found to be largely rotten, and to support the new thatch would have to be renewed.  However, the old frame also supported the bedroom ceilings, and these we wished to preserve.  The architect's solution was to construct a new frame over the existing one, and then suspend the old, weakened timbers from it, to carry the ceilings.

The wall heads had, of course, to be repaired at the same time.  This was done in a mixture of rubble stone set in lime mortar, built up on the existing cob, or mud, walls.  The new thatch is water-reed, and the roof is finished with a plain ridge, as is the Devon tradition.  The work was done by local roofing and thatching firm, C. Robinson.

To finish off this part of the work, the house was securely boarded up. Other commitments did not allow the next phase to begin until the following year.  This was undertaken by another local, but slightly larger, general building firm, C.J. Cox.  In addition to minor structural repairs, the work consisted in giving the cottage a general overhaul, to make it habitable again.

The windows and doors, the external render and the internal plaster, were all in poor condition.  One alternative, and probably the cheaper one, would have been to strip out all the existing finishes and completely renew them, copying the original work.  The danger of this approach is that not only do you lose the texture and feel of old materials, but that in addition, however carefully and sensitively the new work is carried out, nothing can stop it being the work of late 20th-century craftsmen, rather than early-19th; and nothing, therefore, can stop the building from becoming a 20th-century creation in the eyes of future generations, even if not of our own.

The other alternative is to keep as much as possible of the original work, and to carefully repair it.  The repairs will be obvious, but the reason for them will also be obvious, and will be part of a continuous process in the life of that building, rather than an interruption.  This was the approach that Landmark adopted.  All the doors and windows were repaired, apart from one upstairs window on the north side, which was entirely missing; and the outside door in the lean-to, which was beyond repair.  Inside, the stairs, partitions and upper floors were similarly made good where necessary.  The slate floor in the kitchen was lifted to put an insulating membrane beneath it, and in the
parlour, a cement floor was replaced with a similar membrane and a new slate floor.  The plaster on the walls was patched, and then limewashed.

The kitchen range was retained, and re-blacked, and entirely new kitchen fittings provided.  A new bathroom was inserted in the lean-to.  The previous facilities for washing consisted of one tap and a bowl in a small porch on the front of the cottage, which we removed.  Providing an adequate new water supply was a major undertaking, requiring the sinking of a new well.  

On the outside of the building, the taller chimney had to be rebuilt entirely, as did the top of the shorter one.  The chimneys pots were not replaced.  The render was patched with new lime render, before the whole cottage was limewashed, in a colour to match that found on the old render.

The outbuildings were also derelict.  The lean-to on the end of the cottage was coming away from the gable and had to be stitched back to it.  The rag-slated roof was stripped and repaired and the slates re-fixed, with second- hand ones to make up the gaps.  In this type of roofing, which is common in Cornwall and West Devon, larger slates are nailed directly onto the rafters, rather than onto battens laid across them - presumably in an attempt to economise on timber.  The wash-house, on the other hand, has an ordinary slate roof, of Cornish slate (Countesses, in traditional slate size-names), which also needed repair.  After renewing the structure, as many as possible of the old slates were relaid, with second-hand ones to make up.  On the ridge, there were some special ventilating tiles, and two of these were retained.  The chimney was rebuilt, the walls repointed and the window repaired.

When the undergrowth around the building was being cleared, the privy was discovered underneath a large pile of brambles.  This was given a new slate roof, but it was decided that the door was adequate for its purpose.  The kennel beside it was made to house the pump for the new sewage treatment plant.

One of the reasons for the cottage being left empty had been the severe damp.  To help cure this, the ground was dug away from the upper end and a new retaining wall built of beach pebbles.  Then a French drain was dug right round the building.  When the earth was scraped away, the stone path was found beneath it, so this was lifted and then laid back over the drain, and then extended to reach round to the wash-house. 

With its orchard and small garden, Bridge Cottage provides an area of cleared space and domesticity in the now thickly wooded coombe, a reminder of ordinary life lived in remote places over many centuries.