The Town House..

In 1747 the Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor obtained a licence to build a cottage to house the old and infirm parishioners, and the Lord of the Manor was asked to provide a piece of land for that purpose from the Waste or common land. The site chosen was between the Hempnall stream and Marl Bottom, which originally linked through to a track around the south eastern side of the churchyard. It was built with two rooms downstairs, each with its own fireplace, with one of the rooms occupied by the overseer and the other used as a day room for the inmates. The two upstairs rooms each had separate stairs, one room being for the men and one for the women. There was a small garden between the cottage and the river, which would have been the only source of water.

Quite when or why the property became known as the Town House, as opposed to the Poor House, isn't known but it was marked as such on the 1818 Enclosure Award map, and its name might signal that it was owned by the parish, in the same way that the Town Land Charity later became the village Poor's Land Charity. Under the Enclosure Award, the surrounding common land was granted to the Trustees for the Poor, now the Fuel Allotment charity, and it seems reasonable to suppose that it would have been cultivated by the Town House residents. By the late 1830s the building was in a bad state of repair, to such an extent that the newly appointed rector, the Rev. Henry Preston, referred to it as the "Pest House". In donating materials for its repair, he forbade the practice of forcing the old and infirm residents to work on the adjoining allotments.

By then Tasburgh had become a member of the Depwade Union and was already sending some of its poor to the Pulham Workhouse, and not long after the Town House was being let by the Overseers as two cottages with the rents being used to contribute to the costs of the workhouse. By the 1920s the cottages were let to the Burgess and Cushion families at a rent of £3 each, with a further £3 being paid to rent the adjoining land belonging to the Fuel Allotment Charity. Following the Local Government Act of 1894, the Parish Council took over the administration and ownership from the Overseers, but the property became increasingly expensive to repair, and when faced with the cost of having to sink a well to provide clean water, the Council decided in 1927 that the property should be sold with first option being given to the tenants, a decision which was supported by the residents of the village at the Annual Parish Meeting in December that year.

At their February meeting in 1928, the Parish Council agreed to accept an offer of £70 from Dennis Cushion, and the sale was completed in May 1929. The Conveyance or transfer deed refers to the property as two cottages in the occupation of Dennis Cushion and William Burgess, and the accounting records of Tasburgh United Charities show the ongoing receipt of rent on behalf of the Fuel Allotment Charity from Mr Cushion and Mr Burgess for the adjoining land. It would appear that Mr Cushion paid £2 a year for the land to the east of the Town House, indicating that he probably occupied the cottage nearest the Ipswich Road, whilst Mr Burgess paid £1 for the land to the west, and no doubt had to pay Mr Cushion £3 rent for his cottage. The last recorded rent payment by William Burgess was in 1937, after which Dennis Cushion paid £3 for all the land, so perhaps it was around that time that the two cottages became a single dwelling.

The Tasburgh United Charities' records also show that in 1954 Mr Cushion of Riverside House, Marl Bottom as the property was by then known, offered to buy the land for £100. For whatever reason it seems the sale didn't go ahead, because following his death, the trustees received an offer in 1973 from his family to purchase part of the land for £1,250, presumably to make Riverside House more saleable. After a lot of correspondence about boundaries and terms, the sale was finally completed in 1976, and the purchasers renamed the property as Mistletoe Cottage, after a large bunch of mistletoe on an old apple tree in the garden. Since then the old thatched cottage has been substantially extended but the name is still in use today, though the apple tree and its mistletoe have long gone.