Building record LCS 231 - Upper Abbey Farmhouse

Upper Abbey Farm is a grade II-listed building lying in open countryside approximately 800 m north-east of the ruins of Leiston Abbey. Until circa 1800, when it was replaced by a new house now called ‘Leiston Old Abbey’ 400 m to the south, it formed the principal residence of a large estate containing some 1,500 acres. This land extended to the sea and included the site of the original Leiston Abbey abandoned due to flooding in 1363. Known in the 18th century as ‘Old Lady Abbey Farm’ it appears to represent the medieval home farm which belonged to the Abbey of St Mary and archaeological evidence of early occupation may be discovered during any future groundworks. The oldest building now extant is a substantial early-17th century aisled barn, but carved and moulded timbers from at least one high-status early-16th century structure were re-used in the present farmhouse. This house consists of a late-18th century red-brick range to the south with a slightly older timber-framed wing of the late-17th or early-18th century to the north. The latter has formed a separate dwelling for at least a century, with sales particulars of 1909 describing it as a five-roomed bailiff’s house as opposed to the ‘old Georgian farmhouse’.
The interiors of both wings were heavily renovated during the mid-19th century, when a two-storied extension was built to the east, and very few original fixtures and fittings survived even before a recent fire that destroyed the southern roof and gutted the bedrooms beneath. Despite this, however, the external appearance of the house remains almost exactly as depicted on a rare manuscript estate map by Isaac Johnson of Woodbridge in 1786, when it was described as ‘the mansion house of this estate’ and was the home of George Doughty, gentleman (for whom it was probably built after his acquisition of the lease in 1772). The fine panelled door case of the fashionable southern facade, complete with a broken pediment, is now hidden by a Victorian porch but is otherwise intact and precisely as drawn by Johnson. It is rare for a Georgian farmhouse of this modest scale to have escaped substantial enlargement and embellishment in later centuries, and for a contemporary drawing to prove the point (S1).