Farmstead record ABK 024 - Farmstead: Green Farm (unknown)

Green Farm (unknown), Ashbocking. 19th century farmstead and farmhouse. Dispersed cluster plan formed by working agricultural buildings. The farmhouse is set away from the yard. Significant loss (over 50%) of the traditional farm buildings. Located within a village (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.

One of the remaining historic barns is a five-bay timber-framed and partly ship-lapped threshing barn with lower modern single storey outbuildings and small silos either abutting or attached to it. The barn has a floor that is a patchwork of slightly stepped sections of modern screed concrete with two shallow metal lined sumps towards the southern end. The barn has a steeply pitched gabled roof, clad almost entirely in red clay pantiles. Originally there would have been pairs of principal double threshing doorways located opposite each other on the east and west elevations in the centre of five bays (i.e. with two bays to each side). Neither cart entrance now conforms to the often encountered, forward projecting tall porch arrangement of intact barns. Such double doorways were sometimes gabled and sometimes hipped but this feature is now absent and the late 19th and 20th century plans only show a projecting outshut to the west side. The roof structure over each central bay has angled valley rafters and a central principal rafter indicating the former existence of the former cart entrances projections. The construction method of the roof is standard A-frame of principal trusses with four tie beams dividing the barn into five bays. The trusses 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. The tie beams to the intermediate bays are located onto the wall plate to the side as bolted timber brackets are used to strengthen the junction of the principal studs, dividing the bays, to the principal rafters above. The roof comprises four common rafters per bay interconnected with two lines of short staggered purlins that run between the principal rafters for the entire length of the roof. The lower purlins are morticed into the shorter lower rafters but above the lower purlins the rafters are longer, thinner and run over the upper purlins. Above the rafters are very close spaced laths. The barn has almost no discernable plinth below the sole plate with only two courses of a red brick plinth visible along part of the east side of the frame towards the southern end (S7).