Farmstead record DRK 057 - Farmstead: Green Farm

Green Farm, Drinkstone. 19th century farmstead and farmhouse. Regular courtyard U-shaped plan formed by working agricultural buildings. The farmhouse is set away from the yard. Only the farmhouse survives. 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.

Green Farm is a timber-framed house of the late-17th century that contains a number of historically interetsing features. The house reflected the typical domestic layout of its period, with a central hall flanked by a chimney, lobby entrance and parlour to the north, a pair of storage rooms to the south, and a low attic storey above. Such a property would have been apprpriate to a modest but respectable 'husbandman', farming perhaps fifty acres of alnd rather than the hundred acres or more that justified 'Yeoman' status, and was probably constructed on the eponymous medieval green when its land was first enclosed for agriculture. The structure incorporates numerous timbers that were recycled from earlier buildings and was always rendered externally: rare areas of roughcast render with traces of pargeted decoration still survive on the back wall where they were preserved by the addition of a two-storied extension in the 19th century. The modern rear kitchen occupies an unusual 17th century building that was formerly detached and probably contained a dairy and bakehouse, although its present gable chimney is a reconstruction of circa 1800 (S7).