Farmstead record WLN 122 - Farmstead: Lymball's Farm

Lymball's Farm is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed Os map. The farm is laid out in a regular L-plan with additional detached elements. The farmhouse is detached and set away from the yard. The farm sits alongside a public road in an isolated location. This farmstead survives intact (S1-4).

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 complex of farm buildings at Lymballs Farm includes an exceptionally well preserved late-16th century timber-framed threshing barn in three bays that has been omitted in error from the Schedule of Listed Buildings. The storey posts flanking its entrance have been renewed in modern brick and the studs of the central bay’s back wall were removed when a lean-to rear porch was added in the 19th century, but the framing is otherwise completely intact, with a full complement of wind-braces to the clasped-purlin roof. Internally trenched wall braces survive at all four corners and even the arch-braces to the tie-beams remain in situ despite the loss of the front posts. Both roof-plates contain edge-halved and bridled scarf joints of typical 15th and 16th century form. The steeply pitched roof was designed for thatch rather than its present corrugated iron and the brick plinth is a 19th century replacement. A good 19th century brick stable with a hay drop in its ceiling adjoins the barn’s southern gable and a re-roofed shelter-shed of the same period projects from its north-eastern corner. A pair of late-19th century brick and boarded sheds lies to the south of the complex, but the Fletton brick structures that enclose a cattle yard to the west were added in the mid-20th. The nearby farmhouse dates from the early-19th century, but the farm buildings lie in close proximity to a complete but empty moat that almost certainly marks the site of the well documented medieval manor of Lembaldes owned in the 13th century by the eponymous Thomas de Lymworth. This moat is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Medieval farm buildings often lay just outside their respective house moats, and the barn may occupy the position of a 13th century predecessor. The site is accordingly of special historic significance (S5).