Farmstead record ETN 025 - Farmstead: Bentries Farm

Bentries 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 sits alongside a public road in an isolated location. There has been a partial loss of working buildings.

The property was formerly a substantial tenanted holding on the Duke of Hamilton’s Easton Park Estate and extended to 286 acres at the time of the tithe survey in 1838. The pantiled brick and weatherboarded cart lodge which flanks the entrance to the site dates from circa 1830 and was shown on the tithe map but not an earlier plan of the farm drawn in 1817. It was described in the Easton Park Estate auction catalogue of 1919 as a ‘4-bay Waggon Lodge with Granary over’, and includes a lean-to shed against its rear wall that was added as part of a major expansion of the farm complex between 1838 and 1883. Most of this complex is understood to have been demolished after sustaining major damage during the 1987 ‘hurricane’, leaving only the cart lodge and barn still standing along with a rebuilt shelter-shed and a building adjacent to the cart lodge that appears to represent the 1919 catalogue’s ‘Harness House with Loft over’. The cart lodge’s refurbishment included the renewal of its external weatherboarding and the partial removal of the internal divisions between its four bays, but in most respects it survives unaltered and represents a typical example of its kind. Well preserved and extensive examples of cladding painted with red ochre in this way are increasingly rare, and serve to illustrate the appearance of local farm buildings before tar became ubiquitous during the mid-19th century (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.