Barcud Cottage History
The ancient walls of Barcud Cottage radiate a timeless atmosphere. In places they are a metre thick. Barcud Cottage is the oldest building at Cwmcroiddur. It's a Welsh longhouse, around five hundred years old. It would have originally been a longer building, with a stone-tiled roof and oak cruck truss beams (beams made from the trunk and lower limb of an oak tree, split to give two identical beams that reached from the ground and were jointed at the top). The people would have lived at one end. In the winter, the animals would be at the other end of the building.
The old cottage
We don't know much about the people who lived at Cwmcroiddur before the Farmhouse and Barn were built - we would love to find out more.
One reference from August 1766 shows that John Price and his daughter Elizabeth Price were mentioned in the records of a marriage settlement... while another shows that the Price family were still at Cwmcroiddur in 1810 when David Jones married Mary Price, daughter of John Price of Cwmcroiddur.
After the Barn and Farmhouse were built in the early nineteenth century, Barcud Cottage became a cowshed. It probably had
a slate roof at this time, as its original stone tiles were used as building material for the Barn. You can still see the thin stones
of the walls of the Barn - these were the roof tiles from the Cottage!
Barcud Cottage lost its slate roof at some point - this was replaced with corrugated iron and it remained in use as a cowshed. This is how the building was until the mid 1990's when it was the last of the three buildings to be renovated. The tin roofed cowshed was converted into a cottage.
When we arrived in 2006, the Cottage was dowdy and needing upgrading. We completely re-made the bathroom, added skirting boards throughout the building, hand-made vanity units in the bedrooms and new lighting in the kitchen.
Time for an upgrade
We redecorated throughout in Farrow and Ball colours and removed the unreliable old propane combi boiler. The heating and hot water supply is now fed from the upgraded Farmhouse system. Most of the heating and hot water for Barcud Cottage is now provided by burning locally grown firewood.
Outside, we added the stone garden walls, patio and flower beds, giving Barcud Cottage its own outside space.