Farmstead record PRH 047 - Crabbes Farm

Crabbes Farm is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed Os map. The farmstead is laid out in a regular U-plan with additional detached elements. The farmhouse is detached and set away from the yard. The farmstead sits alongside a public road in an isolated location. There has been a partial loss of working buildings with large scale modern infrastructure on site.

The house is a timber-framed and rendered grade-II listed structure. Depicted on the tithe map with a simple rectangular outline before the addition of its present brick lean-to sheds in the mid-19th century, it contains three separate phases of construction, all of which can be distinguished from the exterior, and neatly illustrates the manner in which early farmhouses could be extended and upgraded as fashion and wealth dictated. The central section of the building is a rare ‘two-cell’ husbandman’s dwelling of the early-16th century with a floored hall, cross-passage and service room but no parlour beneath an intact collared-rafter roof that was half-hipped at both gables. The principal timbers are widely spaced and consist of vulnerable elm rather than oak, making its survival all the more remarkable. In the late-16th century this modest house was provided with a new high-quality, closely-studded oak-framed parlour with a clasped-purlin roof that blocked the window of its north-western gable and possessed its own external entrance. A new chimney was built to heat both the old hall and the new parlour, but the present chimney appears to be a reconstruction of the 17th century designed to incorporate a third fireplace in the first-floor chamber. At the beginning of the 17th century a lower, narrower bake-house was added to the original service gable, although its walls were raised in the 19th century when a large new gable chimney was built. The house preserves a number of good features, including diamond mullioned windows, early pargeting and an impressive arched fireplace (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.