8 NOTES ON SOME OLD DERBYSHIRE COTTAGES. 



show that this must at one time have been the usual type of 

 labourers' cottage in the country. 



A house at Little Eaton being pulled down in 1896, disclosed 

 a very perfect pair of cottages of this kind, and gave me an 

 opportunity of examining their construction. An additional 

 room having been added at each end, the original gables had 

 become inner walls, and thus their original construction of 

 wattles and clay had been preserved intact. Each house con- 

 sisted of a single room, about fifteen feet by thirteen feet, and 

 seven feet high to the wall plate ; a door had been cut through 

 the centre wall to throw the two houses into one, and a 

 chamber floor had been added, as in those at Morley. At 

 one end was a large open fireplace, with a projecting hood to 

 carry off the smoke, also formed of wood and clay like the 

 walls. Another cottage at Little Eaton, pulled down in 1897, 

 also had the original rafters remaining in the partition wall ; 

 whilst an uninteresting looking cottage at Matlock Town, when 

 pulled down, disclosed a very massive pair of rafters, bedded 

 in the wall, which had evidently been rotted away at the 

 bottom when the stone walls were built, and appeared to be of 

 a great age. 



In the Rev. J. C. Atkinson's delightfully interesting book 

 entitled Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, mention is made 

 of examples of this kind of buildings, to which he gives the 

 appropriate name of ' Rafter-built houses,' existing in the Cleve- 

 land district, and the exact similarity of construction between 

 these and the Derbyshire examples is rather remarkable. In the 

 course of time these "rafter-built" houses were superseded by 

 framed buildings, which required greater skill on the carpenter's 

 part, as the framing of the walls had to bear the weight of 

 the floors and roof instead of having merely to carry the feet 

 of the small rafters, the timbers had therefore to be carefully 

 mortised and tenoned together, and stiffened by diagonal braces ; 

 but in spite of their more careful construction, the frame- built 

 buildings have in many cases, through the decay of the pins 

 and tenons, become crippled and given way long before the 



