The Lost Cottages - Unnamed House

This little house is private property in relatively good condition, and understandably monitored by CCTV to prevent further damage. Broken windowpanes attest to previous vandalism, so the CCTV seems like a very good idea. In order to not attract people to the place, I won't include any location details in this post. Luckily, perhaps, I can't find anything about it online, either, apart from a few references to it being leased or sold as a group with some other nearby houses early in the twentieth century. I cannot find a Coflein report for the cottage, although sometimes the Coflein site isn't the easiest to seach, and many house names are quite ubiquitous. I felt tentative about photographing and posting this one, but it feels important to capture images of these places before they fall into the hopeless ruins one usually finds.

The cottage is a simple little single storey place, with blue painted windows. A photo found online from 2004 shows all of the cottage woodwork painted blue with a horseshoe hanging on the outbuilding door, guttering still intact, if failing, and the front of the house more neat with whitewash than it is now. Even so, the cottage still seems in reasonably good condition 16 years later, although the roof is in worse condition.

 

 The south end of the house faces the little track that runs past the property, and looks in reasonably good condition, if ivy-covered.

 Against the end wall a few slates lean up. Some are roof slates but some are larger.

Possibly these pipes are old guttering pipes. The house has more recently been fitted with plastic guttering, which indicates it has been looked after for longer than a lot of these places.

 

 

Another interesting feature is the non-native planting, not something usually seen about these cottages. It's more usual to see crabapple trees, perhaps soapwort, and even a lilac tree, rather than this overgrown hedge of a type more often seen in towns.

 

 

 The front door is locked with a sturdy padlock, and probably it and the doorframe are not original, when compared with the blue door and frame of 16 years ago. The windows have been boarded up to prevent entry and weather damage.

 

 

The right hand window shows smashed panes. Both windows and door have solid stone lintels instead of wooden beams, which will, no doubt, help the house stand solid through time.

 

 

The left hand window, boarded up from inside. The frame is rotting away.

 

 

The right hand window with broken panes which probably attest to past vandalism.

The front doorstep, which looks as if an old slate flag has been set in a concrete step. The 2004 photo shows a kind of crazy paving slate path across the garden from the front door.

The lean-to at the north end of the building looks in rather worse shape than the house. The door has been changed since 2004.

Looking north in front of the house. Old bedsteads and a pallet have been used as a fence. 

At the end of the house, an old bed leans up against the wall. 

The hill rises up around the back of the house, but the land has been dug out to protect the walls from damp.

There appears to have been a small structure, perhaps a storage area, built at the back of the lean-to, with a blocked up window above.

This is possibly a plate from a stove, for the chimney to go through.

The window into the lean-to has also suffered from vandalism.

The north end of the house, with the chimney apparently in good condition.

This appears to be a door with a window in it and possibly a letterbox beneath. Perhaps once it was the front door.

A window at the back, possibly with a TV aerial cable leading into the property.

The guttering is falling off at the back of the house.

A ditch runs along the back to help prevent damp.

A little way from the house is this small outbuilding made of nice faced stone.

Some of the rubbish inside the outbuilding attests to a relatively recent occupation of the house, if the rubbish came from the house.

In the very corner of the outbuilding is a small slit window. There was another, blocked up, roughly halfway along the back wall.

Outside the outbuilding is part of an old children's bike, with a distinctly 60s or 70s look to it.

A close up of the bike wheel, covered in moss. I wonder if there were children here, running in and out of the house and about the woods that surround it. It would have been a lovely place to grow up.