Listed Buildings

Bratton Clovelly Listed Buildings

Bratton Clovelly Listed Buildings. Click here to see zoomable map.

English Heritage has identified over 30 listed buildings in the Bratton Clovelly parish, detailed at the British Listed Buildings website. A variety of structures are identified dating from the 14th to 19th centuries, including farmhouses, cottages, barns, the church and school, a boundary stone and even a headstone. The Church of St Mary is Grade I listed with the following excerpt from the detailed observations of the website above:

St Mary the Virgin Norman Font, from ‘Some Old Devon Churches’

“This church raises interesting questions as to its projected plan in the C14, which, if carried out as was originally apparently intended, would have made it remarkably grand for such a small and remote village. The further importance of the building lies in the preservation of much medieval structure enhanced by the remarkable survival of a large amount of wall paintings.”

You can find out more about this impressive church from John Stabb’s description in Some Old Devon Churches written in 1911. The longhouses are also of particular interest, for example the West Burrow farmhouse:

“This is an unusual survival of a longhouse with unconverted shippon which is also not in a typical moorland or moorland fringe position but stands several miles away from Dartmoor. Though not a ‘true longhouse’ in the purist sense because a solid full-height wall exists between shippon and passage, it seems clear that it is a late medieval house with integral accommodation for animals and humans and internal access from the domestic end to the animal end. As such it could be defined as a ‘developed longhouse’ plan.”

There is also an article of fine architectural and historic detail, A Visit to Rural West Devon, written when the Devon Buildings Group held their Annual General Meeting in Bratton Clovelly in 1997. The article includes an extensive description of the parish church, St Mary the Virgin, as well as the Court Barton, Swaddledown and Chimsworthy farms.