Farmstead record SBT 046 - Farmstead: Snow's Hall

Snow's Hall is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed Os map. The farmstead is laid out in a regular F-plan with additional detached elements. The farmhouse is detached and set away from the yard. The farmstead sits alongside a public road in an isolated location. There has been a significant loss of working buildings.

Heritage Asset Assessment was written in 2012 to inform an application for planning permission. The building is brick laid in monk bond with a gable roof clad in corrugated iron.There was a corrugated iron shed attached to the south elevation which has now been removed.

In the west gable end is a narrow doorway to the north, raised above the ground as a muck door. There is also a window in the centre of the elevation. At the first-floor level is a hay-loft loading door, hidden from the exterior by the corrugated iron. This, and the fact that there is a second floor internally, or at least half of one, tells us that the building was constructed as a stables for the working farm horses. The east gable head has a window to the ground floor and to the attic storey, lighting the hay loft, and there are four openings in the south wall: a five-plank door to the extreme east end leading directly to the exterior rather than into the later Building F, a two-light window and two stable doors in the centre and at the west end, the last just an opening now. The interior has a twentieth-century alteration in the form of a concrete floor most likely replacing the original stable tiles. The interior is dominated by the first-floor hay loft, of boards supported on joists and three rectangular posts and one telegraph pole. The platform originally extended all the way to the west end, to allow the loading of hay from the west upper doorway, and was reached by a staircase against the west wall immediately ahead of the western doorway in the south wall. Timber cheeks to this staircase survive, but very little else. The east gable head has a weatherboarded internal lining for the sake preventing the ingress of moisture.

The hay-loft platform is supported on transverse bridging beams and longitudinal joists and there is a tie beam beneath battened studwork reaching up to the ridge piece at the point west of which the hay loft is missing. The underside of this beam has mortise holes for studs, suggesting that the interior was divided into two ground-floor and two first-floor rooms. In the north-east corner is an internal buttress-like structure, which might be the remains of a chimney flue, which are usually necessary in stables, or very close to them. The roof has four principal rafters, each separated by three common rafters, and there are collars clasping a single tier of purlins (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.