Farmstead record DLL 019 - Farmstead: Valley Farm

Valley Farm is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed OS map. The farmstead is laid out in a regular L-plan with buildings to the third side and the farmhouse 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.

The farmhouse lies on the eastern side of White House Farm Lane, close to its junction with Grove Road on the south, while the timber-framed and weatherboarded barn is on the western side immediately opposite. Both buildings were shown on the tithe map of 1841. The appearance of the house is consistent with the 17th century or before and it may be contemporary with the barn which dates from the late-16th century or the very beginning of the 17th, although neither structure is listed. The barn is a small threshing barn of three bays and just 10.1 m in length by 5.3 m in width with a central entrancing facing east towards the farmhouse. Although shown as detached in 1841 it was incorporated into a larger yard complex in the mid-19th century but only fragments of the later sheds now remain. The original roof, which was probably a clasped-purlin structure steeply pitched for thatch, was replaced in the mid-20th century with shallow-pitched softwood clad in corrugated iron. In other respects the high quality oak frame is unusually well preserved: all but seven of its wall studs remain in situ, along with its original ground sills, seven of its eight internally trenched corner braces and all four arch-braces to its tie-beams. The roof-plates contain 16th century-type edge-halved and bridled scarf joints, and part of an original lean-to porch survives to the rear flanked by later lean-to additions. Small barns of this kind were unable to meet the ever-increasing demands of agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries and are now much less common than their larger counterparts. The great majority of early threshing barns, whether large or small, contained full-height entrance doors opposite low, narrow doors in their back walls with no evidence of the lean-to rear porches that were intended to lengthen their threshing floors. Such porches became the norm only during the 19th century, and the partly intact late-Tudor example here is among the earliest so far discovered (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.