West to the street, east to the garden
Prides Cottage faces west across its front garden to the High Street in Child Okeford, and the sitting room takes light from both sides, through a front window and a glazed door to the back garden. A log-burning stove warms the room under a chamfered central beam, which the listing reads as part of the original timber frame.
Historic England listed the cottage at Grade II on 24 June 1985 as one of a pair, under the name Rossiters and the Cottage, and the Dorset Historic Environment Record gives The Cottage as the former name of Prides Cottage. The entry dates the pair to the late eighteenth century and describes a thatched roof with brick stacks at the gable ends and partway along the ridge, two stories, three-light casement windows and porches added in the twentieth century. It names no builder. The house stands inside the Child Okeford Conservation Area.
The rooms
The kitchen, 14 feet 1 inch by 13 feet 10 inches, is laid out in an L of cream cabinets with solid oak counters, beside the original brick fireplace and under a large west window to the front garden. Behind it are a utility room, a shower room and a door to the back garden. Floorboards run through the ground floor.
Two staircases, one from the hall and one from the kitchen, lead to the bedrooms. The principal bedroom, on the north side, has a cast-iron fireplace, built-in storage and windows over both gardens, and the second bedroom has a window seat in the west light. Between them is the bathroom, with a roll-top bath, a reclaimed antique vanity and tongue-and-groove paneling.
The garden and the hill
The old garage, brick under a slate roof, is now a garden room of 17 feet 6 inches by 8 feet 3 inches, with large glazed doors to a patio. The gardens wrap the house front and back, with perennials and grasses around the lawn, raised vegetable beds and a mature apple tree, and there is private parking off the street.
Hambledon Hill rises above the village. Its summit holds a Neolithic causewayed enclosure and an Iron Age hillfort, both Scheduled Monuments, and the National Trust owns the hill. In August 1645 between 2,000 and 4,000 Clubmen camped on it until Cromwell's New Model Army drove them off on 4 August.
