about us
We love living here in the Blackdown Hills. We arrived after a gradual journey westwards - following a long period working in London. First living in a couple of places in Dorset, then deciding to move to Devon to be closer to family. We heard of an old farmhouse coming up for sale and decided to take a look – we knew we wanted to live here as soon as we drove round the corner at the top of the lane and caught the first glimpse of it through the trees. But someone else beat us to it and we had to wait for it to come back on the market – not once but twice more! After buying it at the third attempt, we started the long processes of restoration – keeping all the lovely old things but fixing all the broken stuff. Now we welcome visitors and love to give them the perfect get away in one of Devon’s secret valleys.
Edric's Farmhouse has a fascinating history. There has been a house on this site since before the time of the Domesday book in 1086. The first owner mentioned in Domesday is ‘Edric the Cripple’, listed as being Lord in 1066, followed by his son Edward in 1086. Domesday says there were 2 cattle and 50 sheep on the land and the annual value to the Lord was 27 pounds and 5 shillings.
The current house was built in Tudor times, somewhere around the 1520s. The original house was just the sitting room and the snug room and the ‘cross passage’ between them. The amazing old features you can see in the photos date back from that time – like the two big inglenook fireplaces, the Tudor mantelpiece in the sitting room and the wooden screen running along the side of the entrance hall (this is called a plank and muntin screen and was common in houses of this age).
The current TV room and bedroom above it were added on in the 18th century, and then the utility room and kitchen diner were added in Victorian times.
There’s a set of ancient foot worn stone steps down to the kitchen. These were the stairs down to the barn where the livestock would have been kept. When we bought the house, the far end of the kitchen diner (the kitchen end) was still a big open barn with a high ceiling and crumbling walls. We rebuilt this end of the house using the original stone.
During the renovation, we tried to keep all the old features but make the house more comfortable with modern plumbing, central heating etc. Some things we uncovered as we renovated – like the amazing carved stone fireplace in bedroom 2 upstairs.