Farmstead record WGD 043 - Farmstead: Abbey Farm (LA) HBR

Abbey Farm, Wingfield. 19th century farmstead and 16th century farmhouse. Regular courtyard multi-yard plan formed by working agricultural buildings. The farmhouse is set away from the yard. The farmstead is extant. Located within a hamlet (S1-6).

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.

Abbey Farm lies in open countryside on a ridge of high ground at the eastern edge of Wingfield parish, close to its border with Fressingfield. At the time of the tithe survey in 1842 it was a substantial tenanted holding of 186 acres which extended over the boundary. The grade II-listed farmhouse to the south-east of the farm buildings is a timber-framed and rendered structure dated by English Heritage to the late-16th or early-17th century. The property was recorded as Abbey Farm in White’s Suffolk Directory of 1844 and the 1884 Ordnance Survey marks the position of an abbey immediately west of the site. There is no record of any monastic institution in Wingfield (apart from the chantry college by the church), and the farm probably belonged either to Butley or Eye priories which held land in the parish in the Middle Ages. The reason for the Ordnance Survey’s belief is uncertain but may have been based on some unrecorded archaeological discovery near the indicated position. What appears to be an incomplete moat was depicted to the north of the site in 1842 and 1884, but at the time of inspection its southern arm was only a waterlogged depression in the grass. The farm buildings include a fine and largely intact late-16th century timber-framed threshing barn of five bays with an impressive original roof structure of clasped and butt-purlins. With only one or two exceptions it retains all its wind-braces and tie-beam arch-braces, along with evidence of an integral stable lit by diamond mullion windows in its southern bay. This barn is of considerable historic interest. A separate timber-framed stable was added to its southern gable in the late-17th century and this too retains its original roof and a fine ceiling of flat-sectioned chamfered joists. Both buildings initially faced away from the farmhouse towards the suggested site of the Abbey. Part of an L-shaped range of single-storied shelter-sheds to the north of the barn contains copious re-used timber and dates from the late-18th or early-19th century, but was re-roofed and much altered as part of a major refurbishment in circa 1870. This process was typical of the agricultural revolution known as Victorian High Farming and saw the addition of a new clay-lump barn faced in red brick, a new brick stable and numerous cattle yards and shelter-sheds. The resulting sophisticated complex has remained almost unaltered since the 1884 Ordnance Survey and represents a remarkable survival in itself, despite the insertion of various cement-block walls associated with a piggery conversion in the 1980s (S7).