Farmstead record KBU 017 - Fieldbarn: Green Barn

A fieldbarn is visable on the 1st Ed Os Map. The barn is laid out in a regular L-plan and sits alongside a private track. This barn survives intact.

Green Barn lies in the corner of a field in open countryside approximately 100 m east of Kettleburgh Hall. Hodskinson’s map of the county in 1783 shows a medieval common of approximately ten acres known as ‘Kettleborough Green’ to the east of the house. Like many others in the region, this green was enclosed in response to high grain prices and agricultural improvements around the turn of the 19th century, and the tithe map of 1838 shows it divided into two areas of private pasture owned by Kettleburgh Hall (by then a farm of 93.5 acres) and neighbouring Rookery Farm. Both pastures had been provided with ostensibly identical new small barns of which only that belonging to the hall and known today as Green Barn survives. This building is an unusually well preserved red brick structure of circa 1830 which retains its original lean-to rear porch, pantiled roof, southern entrance doors, buttresses, and decorative lozenge-shaped ventilation apertures. During the 20th century a tractor shelter and workshop were added to the facade (the former replacing a mid-19th century extension), the central threshing floor was buried or replaced by concrete and a number of small apertures were made in the walls of the eastern bay to accommodate machinery drives – but in general the fabric remains intact. A large number of tally marks and a clear ‘daisy wheel’ apotropaic symbol have been incised into the porch, which would have operated in part as a granary. Small brick barns of this kind are now rare, not least because their 9-inch thick walls were not designed to withstand the test of time and the vibrations of modern agriculture. Green Barn is accordingly of considerable historic and visual interest, illustrating the rapidly changing nature of the local landscape at the period of its construction. Despite this, however, it probably fails to meet the strict English Heritage criteria for listing in its own right (S1).

Recorded as part of the Farmsteads in the Suffolk Countryside Project. This is a purely desk-based study and no site visits were undertaken. These records are not intended to be a definitive assessment of these buildings. Dating reflects their presence at a point in time on historic maps and there is potential for earlier origins to buildings and farmsteads. This project highlights a potential need for a more in depth field study of farmstead to gather more specific age data.