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Monday 7am - 10pm Tuesday 7am - 10pm Wednesday 7am - 10pm Thursday 7am - 10pm Friday 7am - 10pm Saturday 7am - 10pm Sunday 7am - 10pm

Downe Cottages

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Downe Cottages

Downe Cottages are a collection of nine deluxe and luxury self catering holiday cottages with sea views in North Devon. http://downecottages.com

Address

Downe Cottages, Hartland
Bideford
EX396DA

Opening Hours

Monday	7am - 10pm
Tuesday	7am - 10pm
Wednesday	7am - 10pm
Thursday	7am - 10pm
Friday	7am - 10pm
Saturday	7am - 10pm
Sunday	7am - 10pm

Website

https://downecottages.com/

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A little bit of history ........

Downe is first noted on Hartland’s parish records in the 1480s when the farmhouse would have been no more than an open stone animal shelter for the few cows and sheep that the occupants of Downe owned at that time. The extended human family would have lived above the animals in a thatched room over the open stone animal shelter. (They lived above the animals in order to protect their animals from the pirates that still sailed the North Devon Coast and the brigands that lived on Exmoor and Dartmoor – think of Lorna Doone - and to benefit from a very early form of central heating!) The walls of the family’s home would have been a few feet high along the “longsides” with a thatched pitched roof leading to a centre no more than a foot above head height. In the centre against the North Wall an open fire would have smouldered twenty four hours a day. Stone steps led up the outside wall into the room.

Over the centuries the farm house, rather like Topsy, grew and grew.

In the Sixteenth Century the original open barn became enclosed and was then converted into the farmers’ living quarters. In the Seventeenth Century a first floor was added by lifting the thatched roof and living rooms were added as a new wing on the South of the building, some of the ceiling beams showing signs that they had been gathered from ships wrecked on the coast of the Hartland Peninsula. In the Eighteenth Century a large working kitchen was added to the North of the building (the oak beamed ceiling has beams eight inches deep cut from oak trees grown nearby and still showing the bark of the trees they were cut from). In the Nineteenth Century a barn was added making a Northern Wing to the house and leading to its current “Z shaped” footprint.

In the early Twentieth Century dog kennels were added to the South wing and then slowly as the Century passed all of the buildings making up that “Z shaped” footprint were converted into human accommodation.

The wealth of the farmers at Downe over the Centuries is shown by the size of the main house and the large number of farm buildings that remain and the footprints of the barns that have been lost. The Thrashing Barn was built in the Eighteenth Century and the “L Shaped” cow shed and hay loft added in the Nineteenth Century just after the Napoleonic Wars (shown by the introduction of brick into the stone doorways as labour became expensive as a result of the Wars and the increasing industrialisation of England) and the pine “scissor trusses” that run the length of what was the hay loft.

The farmhouse would have been home to the extended family of the owners of Downe, perhaps as many as four generations lived in the house together. In addition a farm worker or two and their families may have shared the accommodation. Downe was a large property and would have housed as many as thirty people at various times in its history.

Prior to the conversion of the old farm buildings into holiday cottages at the end of the Twentieth Century, Downe had been a working farm. It was the impact of the changes in agriculture caused by political events in the last decades of the Twentieth Century which resulted in the demise of the farm and the loss of the majority of the land which had been farmed by the owners of Downe over the centuries.

One consequence of the conversion of these farm buildings into holiday cottages is that the external walls of the various buildings have barely been altered and the site retains the character of a group of small stone buildings set around the main house. The stone used is very local – most was taken from the land around Downe as it was ploughed and left in large heaps for later use.

One of the most pleasing aspects of the development of Downe Cottages is that one can look out of the back door of the farmhouse and across the courtyard and still see the buildings that the generations delivered pretty much as the their builders saw them.

It is moving to think that in the mid Nineteenth Century a farmer and his wife decided to build the “L shaped” barns that are now Honeysuckle, Ivy, Clematis and Vine Cottages and it is the vision and taste of that farming couple that one still sees when one looks towards the buildings although the use of the buildings has changed.

It is that couple’s imagination which the buildings reflect and it is not hard to imagine them standing by the back door some two hundred years ago, looking across to the newly built barns and feeling pleased with their handiwork.