Farmstead record DEB 016 - Farmstead: Low Farm

Low Farm is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed OS map. The farmstead is laid out in a full regular plan with additional detached elements. The farmhouse is detached and set away from the yard. The farmstead sits alongside a private track in an isolated location.

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.

The outbuildings on the site at Low Farm were at one time ancillary to a small farmhouse to the north of the farm yard. There was also a south-westerly triangulated outbuilding enclosing a small central yard adjacent to a large pond, and a larger barn to the south as shown on the Ordnance Survey Twenty-Five Inch series map of 1881. It is understood that the farmhouse was demolished in the 1950s and that subsequently the southern barn was the subject of alterations by removal of the minor extensions evident in the 19th century. The southwest outbuilding has been largely reconstructed in the modern era and sits on part of the footprint of the building that was in existence in the late 19th situated immediately north of the pond. The barn is a four-bay timber-framed barn. Parts of the upper elevations are timber ship-lapped but are mostly clad in corrugated iron sheeting. Originally there would have been pairs of timber principal double threshing doorways located opposite each other on the east and west elevations in the centre of the three main bays (i.e. with the fourth bay being divided off to form a cart store with a hay-loft above). Such double doorways were sometimes gabled or hipped but this feature is absent. The barn has a steeply pitched roof, hipped at each end, clad in red clay plain pantiles to the south and west elevations and red clay pantiles to the north and east elevations with red half-round ridge and hip cappings. The roof structure over the central bay on each side has angled rafters but no central principal rafter suggesting no former cart entrances projections and none are indicated on the Ordnance Survey Maps. The barn therefore appears never to have conformed to the often encountered, forward projecting tall porch arrangement of many intact Suffolk threshing barns. The construction method of the roof is standard A-frame of principal rafters with three tie beams dividing the barn into four bays. The tie beams span the wall plates and are variably joined to the principal studs. The tie beams on either side of the cart entrance are supported from below by bolted knee braces suggesting a date for construction of sometime during the first quarter of the 19th century. It is possible that Low Farm in common with many others may have started as a small farm in the late 16th to early 17th century. There is no physical evidence to indicate the presence of any earlier farm buildings on the site that might have been demolished to make way for the present ones. The characteristic features within the barn, particularly the bolted knee braces and quite simple general carpentry suggests the barn is likely to post-date 1815 but possibly from no later than the first third of the nineteenth century (S4).