Building record CDD 098 - Barn at Lime Kiln Farm, Coddenham

The former farmhouse is a grade II-listed timber-framed building of c.1600 that was divided into a pair of cottages in the late 19th century. The farm buildings consist of a timber-framed and weatherboarded threshing barn with a hipped pantile roof abutting the road with an adjoining linear range of sheds which projects at an acute angle to the west. The 1839 tithe map shows a barn on the same site but with a slightly different alignment, and the present structure is a replacement of the 1840s or 50s. This change in alignment explains the irregular angle of the sheds, as they incorporate an earlier flint-rubble yard wall that respected the original barn. The existing barn represents the final phase of the East Anglian vernacular framing tradition before the arrival of prefabricated, uniformly sawn softwood in the 1860s and 70s. It survives almost completely intact, with original red-ochre pigment to its external weatherboarding preserved within two slightly later adjoining sheds. This is of special historic interest as it illustrates the appearance of many local barns before tar became readily available in the late 19th- century. The survival of both the front and rear half-hung doors is particularly unusual. The sheds were added in several phases, beginning with a lean-to against the barn and followed by a small detached stable that was subsequently linked to the re-roofed lean-to by a new loose-box, all before 1884. A lean-to open sided shelter shown in 1884 was rebuilt in the 20th century, when a new shelter-shed was added to the barn's southern gable and a steel-framed covered cattle yard built to the south. A large building that defined the southern edge of the site was probably a cattle shed but has since been demolished (S1).