FIVE pairs of houses, set in remote countryside between Holsworthy and Okehampton at Cookworthy Moor, carry with them a legacy of quirkiness that baffles first-time callers.
With no near neighbours, these homes bear the numbering '17 to 24', a definition set by the Forestry Commission when it built the cedarwood houses nearly 50 years ago.
The explanation? The Forestry Commission initiated numbering by its own boundaries, beginning at Hartland, travelling down to East Cornwall, returning to Holsworthy, Broadbury and finally, Cookworthy Moor.
The houses in Devon and Cornwall were just a few of the many hundreds built by the Forestry Commission to accommodate its workers during the explosion of afforestation throughout the UK. The new agency, Forest Enterprise, bears no record of precise numbers.
Scotland saw the bulk of these timber houses, and it was here, above all, that the Swedish or Finnish houses as they were known, developed into self-contained communities.
By the 1980s, after a brief foray into the holiday cottage business and as mechanisation superseded manpower, these forestry houses were gradually sold into private or public ownership.
In March of this year, only 20 remained vacant in Scotland, unsold and 'surplus' by Forest Enterprise definition. One may guess the isolation of their locations might be just too daunting.
Need for self-sufficiency during the Forestry fiefdom is still vivid in the minds of the first residents of Cookworthy Moor.
When water in shared wells ran dry in the summer, an employee in a fire engine was dispatched to Highampton to get extra water from a mains hydrant, two or three loads a day, twice weekly.
In those early days, fire drill was still obligatory for the womenfolk.
'It was a bit of a farce,' one inhabitant recalled.
'The cover was too heavy for the housewives to lift, and they couldn't turn the stop-cock reels.'
Another Forestry diktat was: 'No carpets, and linoleum to finish six inches from the walls.' Tied cottages indeed!
Electricity came to Cookworthy Moor in 1962; the Forestry Commission installed a telephone kiosk, and life was beginning to get easier.
Shopping had never been a problem, with an abundance of tradesmen, one or more a day, and the pleasant walk along an almost deserted road to the post office at Halwill Junction.
Now there is only a thrice-weekly milk delivery, a butcher who calls once a week and the ice-cream man.
Heavy lorries and fast traffic make a walk along the A3079 a potential death-trap.
Plantation by plantation, Cookworthy Moor is in the throes of being harvested. Where once, before the trees matured, there were views to Brentor, Bodmin Moor, Exmoor and the TV mast at Huntshaw, the five pairs of forestry houses are now enclosed — and the cosier for it.
But with each new felling the views are gradually returning.
'Less view, less wind ... more view, more wind,' one older resident predicts from experience.
Now, most of the houses are fully-modernised by their owners with one form or another of central heating; only a minority is wood-burning.
One house retains its original cook-stove — a splendid centrepiece of red enamel, much admired.
Another sports the original telephone kiosk, re-fashioned into a porch.
In many ways the cedar houses were ahead of their time in design, being light and airy with ample storage and the type of window that pre-dated the 1960s 'picture window'.
Never pretty, or prettified, they are certainly a unique feature of the countryside.
A recent extension of ground, giving each dwelling a triple plot, is enviable against the crammed development of the 1990s.
As a visitor once remarked: 'Where else can you step from your garden into 6,000 acres of forest?'