Farmstead record HGH 090 - Farmstead: Rookery Farm

Rookery Farm, Haughley. 19th century farmstead and 17th century farmhouse. Regular courtyard full plan formed by working agricultural buildings with additional detached elements. The farmhouse is set away from the yard. Significant loss (over 50%) of the traditional farm buildings. 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.

Rookery Farmhouse is a timber-framed and rendered building of the 16th and 17th centuries that preserves a number of exceptional historic features including a rare horizontally sliding glazed window that may be the earliest example of its type. The L-shaped house lay on the eastern edge of the medieval common at Haughley Green, a fragment of which still survives in its front paddock. The western range appears to be a standard three-cell 17th century house with a highend chimney but originated in the mid-16th century as a highly unusual structure with a nonstandard layout and a sooted clasped-purlin roof. Most of the evidence of its initial configuration is hidden by later plaster, but it may represent a rare ‘short-stack house’ with a chimney that terminated short of the roof or possibly an ancillary brew-house and bake-house.
More information may be revealed during any future alterations. This range was subsequently normalised and a wing of two separate 17th century phases added to the rear. The westernmost phase of three bays may have originated as a domestic house with a service room and two-bay hall containing a chamfered ceiling and heated by an external chimney. It was extended in the mid-17th century by adding a large new chimney heating the older hall in a dedicated narrow bay with new parlour beyond and a second room with a chamfered ceiling against the present rear gable. The complexity of the resulting arrangement suggests the building included a ‘unit house’ for a semi-independent family member. The mid-17th century extension was converted into storage rooms by inserting new partitions during the late-18th or early-19th century and has been little altered since. It retains its original clasped-purlin roof with wind-braces and rare features such as a pair of sliding wooden window shutters and a solid-treader stair. It also contains the first-floor window noted above. The property is accordingly of considerable historic interest (S7).