Town Farm Farmhouse is a late C17 house with unusual plan and well-preserved Renaissance facade.

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Town Farm is an important vernacular house that was first described by Cyril Fox and Lord Raglan (Monmouthshire Houses III, pp. 51 (fig. 25), 52-3) and listed grade II* as a house of special interest. The house has particular interest because of the relatively unaltered plan and detail dated 1673. The front elevation is symmetrical with a central dated doorway (1673) flanked by four-light ovolo mullioned windows with drip moulds. Fox and Raglan (p. 145) classified Town Farm as an early example of a three-room plan with central service-room. This distinctive plan became increasingly popular in the C17th and is described in Houses of the Welsh Countryside, p.232, figs. 135, 137-8. In this type of plan a central lobby generally provides access to the principal rooms (hall and parlour) on either side of the lobby.

Decorative detail includes the exuberant use of ovolo mouldings for windows, ceiling beams, and the first-floor fireplace (the moulding on the parlour fireplaces has been cut back). The right side of the parlour fireplace has a column made up from reused sections of a circular stone (vice) stair presumably robbed from the castle; the end of the fireplace beam is moulded and integrated in the column. This presumably framed the entrance into an oriel at the side of the fireplace. On the first floor there is a plaster frieze in the principal chamber (over the parlour) and the chamber over the entry. This consists of the repetition of the initials CR, presumably standing for Carolus Rex. The present plaster ceiling covers the original joists with a quirk or reed moulding.

The house is described as 'small' by Fox and Raglan but it is fully storeyed with habitable attics reached by a stair of solid oak treads from the chamber over the kitchen. In addition there is a basement under the entry and parlour with ?dairy separated from cellar (with barrel rack) by a contemporary ventilated partition. The steps from the central bay to the cellar survive.

A lower working kitchen/bakehouse has been added to the Kitchen with first-floor servants'(?) accommodation, probably in the early C19th century. The moderately chamfered spine-beams appear to be reused with the stops buried in the wall; the purlins are chamfered. An oven projection survives in the south-east corner but the oven has been truncated by a doorway into a further addition. This was originally a dairy range which was formerly plastered with a lathed ceiling.

R.F. Suggett/RCAHMW/Feb. & June 2017