Listed Building record MDO37165 - Avice's Cottage, Wakeham, Portland

One of two cottages built in the seventeenth century, greatly altered in the nineteenth century, and now part of Portland Museum. The building has walls of squared and coursed dressed stone block and a thatched roof, and may have been a cross-passage house. A date stone of 1640 is set in the front gable. Surviving internal features include fireplaces and a copper boiler. The name of the house comes from characters in Thomas Hardy’s novel ‘The Well-Beloved’. Dr Marie Stopes gave the property to the Islanders in 1929.

<1> Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), 1970, An Inventory of Historical Monuments in the County of Dorset, Volume II (South East) Part 2 (Monograph). SDO149.

‘(86) PORTLAND MUSEUM and AVICE'S COTTAGE, at the S. end of Wakeham, have thatched roofs and are of the 17th century. The Museum has a single-storey wing at the back; it has been much altered. Avice's Cottage is of one storey and attic with the front wall carried up to a gable over the attic window; it is dated 1640. Two of the windows retain original moulded labels, but the mullions have been removed. On the first floor is an early 18th-century stone fireplace.’

Record last edited

Aug 22 2024 7:57PM