Bridge Cottage, although itself dating only from the 1820s or ’30s, is typical of the kind of building which must always have existed in Peppercombe: smallholders’ and labourers’ cottages, built of the most locally available materials, developing over the centuries from humble single-storeyed dwellings into decent two-storeyed cottages such as we have here. The materials most readily to hand were rubble stone, cob (mud mixed with straw) and thatch, and it is of these that Bridge Cottage is built, with brick for the chimneys, made as tall as possible to provide a draft in this sheltered place.
Inside, the floorboards of the upper floor form the ceiling of the lower, left visible from below in a building tradition surviving from the Middle Ages. There is evidence in the wall heads that at some stage these had been heightened to provide better headroom upstairs, but otherwise the cottage is little altered. The ground floor is arranged in the universal manner, found in cottages throughout the country, with regional variations.
The central front door opens into the kitchen, which is the larger of two downstairs rooms. The end wall is occupied by the large fireplace, on which, before a range was fitted, most of the cooking would have been done over the open fire, in a series of specially-designed pots, either self-supporting, with legs, or able to stand on a trivet; to the left is the bread oven, and on the other side is the corner recess in which the fuel, usually brushwood or furze, would once have been piled.
The inner room is also heated, and there is no sign that the chimney is an addition. It must always have been a parlour, therefore, showing this to have been a house of good quality. Often the inner room of a cottage was a storeroom, or a bedroom, unheated like the rooms upstairs. On the other hand, the parlour here was not the precious, seldom-visited sanctum that is described by some writers on rural life in the last century. The stairs lead out of it, and off it were the back-kitchen, or larder, and the wash-house, which would more normally open out of the kitchen itself.
Further evidence that this was more than the simplest labourer’s cottage is shown by the large wash-house or laundry, with capacity to absorb more than a single family’s clothing. One 19th-century wife must have taken in washing to add to the family income.
At the turn of the century, Bridge Cottage was the home of the Hockin family, who had nine children. One of their daughters married Mr Smales, who lived on the other side of the valley, and farmed the site of the Castle for about fifty years, from 1918. Another daughter, Mrs Packington, later came back with her husband to live in Bridge Cottage for many years, the last person to do so. Stephen Smales, who owns the garage in Horns Cross, and his sister, Mrs Eileen Tucker, remember frequent visits to their aunt and uncle, who had no children of their own and therefore made much of their Smales nephews and nieces. The cottage and its garden were beautifully kept, although of course there was no electricity and minimal plumbing. Mrs Packington finally moved out of the cottage in the 1970s, to live with her niece until her death in her 99th year