Devon Longhouses: Hearth, Shippon and the Working Rural House

Many of the old farmhouses scattered across the Devon countryside began life sheltering cattle as well as people. A Devon longhouse was a single long building in which a farming household lived at one end and its cattle wintered at the other, with a passage between them and, often, one front door for both. Most have long since been converted into ordinary homes, but their plan, their hearths and the traces of their cattle ends can still be read. Understanding the longhouse helps explain how rural families in the South West lived and worked for centuries. It is a building type you will pass many times on the West Country days of our small group tour of England’s villages.

The combined dwelling-and-byre plan

Historic England’s descriptions of longhouses in the South West are consistent. They were rectangular buildings set with their long axis running down the slope, divided into a domestic room uphill and a stock byre downhill, with a cross-passage between the two. In Devon the byre is always called the shippon. Historic England describes longhouses as the dominant farmhouse type in upland settlements of south-west England between the tenth and sixteenth centuries.

The historian of Devon houses N. W. Alcock sets out the typical plan in plain terms. At one end was the inner room, often a chamber for sleeping. Next came the hall, the main living room. Then came the cross-passage, running from front to back with a door at each end. Beyond it lay the third room: in an ordinary farmhouse a service room or store, but in a longhouse a shippon giving winter shelter to the farm’s cattle. The defining feature, as Alcock puts it, is house and shippon under one roof.

What was a shippon used for?

The shippon housed the farm’s cattle through the winter. Research on Devon longhouses for the Dartmoor National Park Authority describes cattle standing in two rows facing the side walls, tethered to posts set into holed kerbs, with feeding racks and troughs along the walls and a cobbled floor drained by a central slab-lined channel running out through the end wall. On Bodmin Moor, Historic England records paved shippons with central stone drains and edging slabs that defined the mangers. In summer, cattle from many lowland farms were sent up to graze on the moors instead.

Building down the slope made the arrangement work. The drain carried waste out of the lower end, away from the living rooms. The same research notes that sooted roof timbers over some shippons suggest the cattle shared the warmth, and the smoke, of the hall’s hearth. For a farming family, keeping its most valuable animals close, sheltered and watched over in winter made obvious sense.

Hearth and hall: from open fire to chimney

The medieval hall was open to the roof, heated by a fire on an open hearth, with the smoke drifting up and out through the thatch. Alcock explains that smoke-blackened roof timbers are the main clue by which medieval Devon houses are identified today. Because Devon thatchers traditionally added new layers on top of old rather than stripping roofs, Historic England notes that medieval thatch, blackened by centuries of smoke, still survives in Devon.

From the later sixteenth century into the seventeenth, chimneys were built into these halls and upper floors inserted over them. Historic England’s guidance describes several ways of placing the new stack. Some backed onto the cross-passage. Some were built inside the passage itself. Others stood between the hall and the parlour, or against the front wall. Higher Eastcott at Northlew, a cob and thatch longhouse of probably the early sixteenth century, gained a front lateral stack in the early seventeenth century. Bread ovens were often built against the new stacks, sometimes showing outside as rounded projections, as at Town Farm, Martinhoe, on the edge of Exmoor.

Alcock adds that the chimney often came well before the floor above the hall, and that upper rooms were added in stages. Each change brought the longhouse closer to a two-storey farmhouse, and each left evidence in the building.

Materials: cob, thatch and stone

On Dartmoor longhouses were built of granite, but across much of Devon the walls were cob. Cob is a mixture of subsoil, straw and water built up in layers, or lifts, and left to dry, then finished with lime render and limewash. Historic England notes that all mud buildings need footings of stone or brick, and the Institute of Historic Building Conservation records the West Country saying that cob needs only “a good hat and a good pair of boots”: a sound roof and a dry stone base. The Institute notes that Devon and other southern and south-western counties have the greatest numbers of cob buildings, and dates surviving examples from the late fifteenth century.

The hat was usually thatch. Historic England records that Devon and Dorset have the highest concentration of listed thatched buildings in the country, and that Devon has long used combed wheat reed, straw combed to remove the leaf, which gives a neat, close finish quite different from Norfolk water reed. Elsewhere stone was used: red sandstone in the red-soil country of east Devon, slatestone in the west, and Old Red Sandstone on the Exmoor fringe, with slate roofs and slate-hung walls appearing where slate was easily shipped.

How did Devon longhouses change?

Most lost their cattle. Historic England’s guidance says the service end, which in longhouses was occupied by livestock, was usually converted to domestic use later. The Landmark Trust adds that shippons were often entirely rebuilt or simply taken into the house. The dates vary widely. At Higher Eastcott the shippon became domestic space in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. At Chimsworthy, Bratton Clovelly, a fifteenth-century longhouse kept its shippon until the late twentieth century. At Luccombe, just over the border in Somerset, a medieval longhouse was converted into an ordinary cross-passage house in the early seventeenth century, with the hall floored over and a lateral stack and oven added.

A few escaped conversion. West Burrow Farmhouse, also at Bratton Clovelly, is built of rendered cob and rubble around 1500, and Historic England’s listing calls it an unusual survival of a longhouse with an unconverted shippon. At Lamerton, a fifteenth-century longhouse abandoned around 1600 survives as a barn, with cob upper walls and the remains of wheat-reed thatch beneath a later corrugated-iron roof.

How can you recognise a former longhouse from outside?

Look for a long, low range built across the slope, with one end noticeably lower than the other. The lower end, the old shippon, often has fewer and smaller windows, sometimes blocked ventilation slits, as Historic England records at Higher Eastcott, and may have its own separate door. Sometimes the lower end has been finished more cheaply than the house, with a different roof covering. A chimney stack set close to the middle of the range may mark where the cross-passage ran. None of these clues is conclusive alone, but together they suggest a building that once housed cattle as well as people.

Longhouses in Devon’s farm landscape

The longhouse belonged to a landscape of scattered farms rather than large villages. Historic England’s survey of farmsteads in the South West records that much of Devon was settled in isolated farmsteads and hamlets of medieval origin, and that the county had 12,000 to 15,000 farmsteads in the late fourteenth century, more than nine-tenths of today’s number. Devon County Council estimates the county has over 33,000 miles of hedges, many on great earth banks, and that more than three-quarters of its hedgebanks are probably medieval.

What those farms produced shaped their buildings. Historic England’s farmsteads survey notes that north and mid Devon specialised in rearing cattle, while east Devon concentrated on dairying. A house built around the needs of cattle, with a warm, sheltered shippon at one end and the household watching over it from the other, made particular sense in country where cattle were the farm’s chief wealth. The many enclosed fields, completed in much of Devon by the sixteenth century according to the same survey, gave each farm its own grazing close to the house.

Around the house grew a cluster of farm buildings. The linhay, an open-fronted cattle shelter with a hay loft above, is characteristic of Devon and west Somerset from the sixteenth century onwards, and buildings like these gave cattle shelter outside the house.

The Devon longhouse and the Dartmoor farmstead

Longhouses survive in their greatest numbers on and around Dartmoor, and they were probably once common on Exmoor too, where fewer early examples remain. The Dartmoor houses are built of granite and include some of the best-preserved shippons anywhere; our article on the longhouses of moorland Devon looks at them, and at the relationship between farm and moor, in detail. Elsewhere in the county, the same plan was built in cob, rubble and slatestone, under thatch or slate, and adapted over time into the farmhouses that still dot the countryside.

The tour introduces these buildings early. At the Weald and Downland museum on the second day, you can see how historic houses were heated, floored and divided, explained in our article on the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. The fifth day crosses Dartmoor, the seventh crosses North Devon and Exmoor, and the eighth visits the cob and thatch cottages of the Holnicote Estate villages in Somerset. Our guide to the England’s villages itinerary follows the whole route, and the England’s villages small group tour is a fine way to see these working houses with a guide who knows what to look for.