Farmstead record CRT 034 - Farmstead: Rookery Farm

Rookery Farm is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed OS map. The farmstead is laid out in a regular F-plan with the farmhouse detached and set away from the yard. The farmstead is set alongside a public road in a loose farmstead cluster. This farmstead survives intact with conversion to residential use.

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 Farm lies in open countryside approximately 0.7 km west of Cratfield parish church, close to the projected course of the Roman road between Peasenhall and Weybread. The farmhouse is a grade II-listed timber-framed and rendered structure of the 16th and 17th centuries which at the time of the tithe survey in 1839 belonged to a modest tenanted holding of 52 acres. The farm buildings lie 75 m south-east of the house and consist of a threshing barn, stable, vehicle sheds and a former neat-house (cow shed). The timber-framed barn is an unusually well preserved three-bay structure of the late-16th century which is broadly contemporary with the farmhouse and contains features of special historic interest. Its wall fabric is substantially intact, including large areas of original external clay render and important evidence of an original integral stable with a separate entrance. Combined barns and stables were unique to East Anglia at this period and small examples of this type rarely survive.
At the beginning of the 19th century the stable was removed in order to enlarge the threshing barn, reflecting the Napoleonic boom in cereal production, and replaced by a new stable built against the opposite gable. This new stable retains a rare ceiling of wattle-and-daub laid on chamfered joists which incorporate a hay drop. Only the barn and stable were present in 1839, but the mid-19th century movement away from intensive cereal production to mixed animal husbandry is represented by a clay-lump neat-house with louvered windows and a mucking out hatch. A pantiled vehicle and shelter-shed was added at the end of the 19th century to complete the farm complex, which survived the 20th century with very little change and neatly illustrates the agricultural history of the region (S1).