MEM22123 - Vale View and Church Cottage, Selworthy (Building)

A pair of mid 19th Century semi detached cottages, probably built to match with earlier 19th Century cottages. The cottages have gothic arched porches and a set of three gothic arched bee-alcoves on the on the front wall which are unique on the estate. The cottages are two storey with rear gabled single cell wings. The walls are rubble stone. There are sandstone blocks forming the quions and window arches. A garden wall runs west from Vale View to ot's outbuildings. One of these outbuildings was built as a privy/store and has corbelled, coped gables. [1] East of the Parish Church is a mid 19th Century cottage pair, Vale View and Church Cottage which appear to replace earlier cottages. They are built of stone with slate roofs, and have Gothic arched porches with coped gables. Unusually, there are three bee alcoves on the front wall, and all these features are in dressed stone. Somewhat set apart, their character barely resembles that of other domestic buildings in Selworthy. [2] Vale View and Church Cottage are a pair of semi-detached estate cottages entirely different in appearance to those on the Green, with unrendered stone walls and slate roofs. They are still very much in the estate workers gothic idiom – with a particular fine gothic-arched porch – but are slightly later in date than the reworking of the Green. It would appear that these cottages were not given the picturesque treatment as they lay outside of the Green. [3] The cottages are shown as a semidetached pair on the 2022 MasterMap data. The northwestern cottage is labelled "Vale View". [4] The buildings are similarly shown on the 25 inch 1st and 2nd Edition and the six inch 3rd Edition Ordnance Survey maps. [5-7] The cottages appear to have replaced a detached cottage shown on the Tithe Map, which abutted the road slightly to the southeast. [8] The heritage asset was assessed for inclusion on the Exmoor Local Heritage List in November 2022. It was decided to add the asset to the Local Heritage List. [9]