Farmstead record CHT 024 - Farmstead: The Hollies

The Hollies is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed Os map. The farmstead is laid out in a regular L-plan with additional detached elements. The farmhouse is detached and set away from the yard. The farmstead sits alongside a public road in a village location. There has been a partial loss of working buildings with the remaining converted for residential use. A modern shed is visible on the side. (S2-5)

The farm consists of a concrete hard-standing with a steel-framed grain store of the 1970s on the north, a timber-framed barn of traditional appearance on the east and a World War II Nissen hut on the west. At the time of the Chilton tithe survey in 1840 the site contained only an isolated barn on 10.75 acres of land. By the Ordnance Survey of 1884 a new farmstead known as the Hollies had been built, with a slate-roofed farmhouse and a complex of outbuildings which included the present barn and a single-storied shed which projects at right-angles from its southern elevation but now belongs to a neighbouring property. The eastern gable of the barn is typical of the mid-19th century, with re-used oak studs interrupted by diagonal primary braces, but the rest of the structure was completely rebuilt in softwood in the mid-20th century, re-using some knee-braced tie-beams and other timbers from the original. This rebuilding may have resulted from wartime damage due to the presence of an American airfield on the land immediately to the north and west. The barn’s eastern gable survived due to the presence of a lean-to shed added in the 1920s or 30s. The Nissen hut is much overgrown, but is a relatively well preserved example of an increasingly rare structure which forms one of very few original buildings to survive from the adjoining RAF Sudbury, built in 1943 and occupied by the USSAAF’s 486th Bombardment Group the following year. Both the inner and outer skins of corrugated iron are largely intact, along with the door and windows of its eastern gable and a pair of heavy internal shelves of reinforced concrete. The timber-framed barn is of limited historic significance given its late date and 20th century reconstruction, but the Nissen hut is of considerable social and historic interest, and may merit further recording in advance of demolition after the clearance of vegetation (S1).

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.