16590

 

II*  

Designated  

08/12/1995  

08/12/1995  

Flimston Farmhouse  

 

Pembrokeshire  

Castlemartin  

 

RAC Range West  

192429  

195646  

 

On RAC Castlemartin Range, W of road to Stack Rocks..  

Domestic  

 

 

History: Flimston consists of a small mediaeval first-floor hall-house radically extended c.1600 into a three-unit farmhouse, and further altered C18/C19. The house has been disused at least since the establishment of the Army Range in 1938. It is now a roofless ruin.. Description: The house as it survives is substantially as altered c.1600. It faces E, and consists of a room to the S which may have been a service room, followed by a through-passage, the site of a kitchen or hall and a parlour cross-wing. The cross-wing projects to the rear and the stairs are positioned in the corner between the main range and the wing. To the S a half-octagon extension. Masonry of the earlier parts is in local limestone rubble. The front later rendered. The roof pitch nearly 45o. Traces of earlier construction indicate that the house was originally a hall-house, with a solar in the N cross wing. Also there is a solar hearth and circular chimney at the N side of the cross-wing, supported on corbels internally and externally, the hearth being at a low level implying a previously lower solar floor unrelated to the chamber floor level of the centre of the house. Its bressummer is chamfered and carried on quarter-round corbels. In the gable wall of the S room is the arch of a large hearth, now blocked, with a large oven at one side and a small oven on the other, and a large square chimney. The house has been altered by the addition of a large service room at the S end, in a masonry consisting of a mixture of random rubble and a proportion of old bricks. The gable chimney of the previous S room was re-used by blocking its arch and forming an opening into the new room. Later small rooms and a porch are at the rear of the house, mostly in brickwork. The room N of the through-passage and the lower storey of the cross-wing have been converted into a single room. This has a front-wall fireplace the flue of which sets across diagonally to the apex of the cross-wing front gable. The walls internally are battened out and lathed for plastering. A vaulted cellar with its floor about 0.5 m below the general ground floor level was perhaps inserted in the rear of the old parlour at the NW corner of the house as part of these alterations, and entered from beneath the staircase. There is a large external water cistern adjacent to it at the N of the building. Listed Grade II* in spite of its ruinous condition as an important specimen of early domestic architecture, both in its mediaeval and its post-mediaeval form. Ancient Monument no. Pe 447 References: RCAHM notes 1993 Dyfed Arch. Trust: S&M PRN 6452