Building record SYL 015 - Red Barn, Syleham Road

Red Barn lies in the north-eastern angle of the junction between Syleham Road and Hoxne Road approximately 250 m south of the famously picturesque Monks Hall in Syleham to which it formerly belonged. Its present name is modern. At the time of the parish tithe survey in 1839 it was an isolated field barn on a large tenanted holding of 208.5 acres adjoined on the east by the appropriately named ‘Field Barn Hill’. The tithe map shows Syleham Road widening to encompass the entire northern elevation of the barn and strongly suggests it was built on a triangle of waste land at the road junction which may well have originated as a small medieval green or tye of a kind once common in the county. The building is a largely intact three-bay threshing barn of standard form which dates from circa 1820 and preserves a particularly fine threshing floor of gault brick. This was originally entered from the south, but by 1839 the doors had been blocked by a new cattle yard served by a lean-to shelter-shed adjoining the barn and containing a detached second shed with a curved wall respecting the road corner. The shallow-pitched roof was probably designed for pantiles but is now covered with corrugated asbestos. The yard is now flanked by a pair of pantiled brick shelter-sheds that replaced those shown in 1839 during the mid-19th century, and two corrugated iron covered cattle yards were added to the east in the mid-20th century.

Many isolated barns of this kind were built in the early-19th century to meet the need for additional threshing and storage space as new land was cultivated for cereals in response to high grain prices during and immediately after the Napoleonic wars. Increasing numbers of
cattle were introduced into Suffolk during the mid-19th century as grain prices fell and the arrival of the railways opened up new markets for dairy produce. Although relatively modest in scale and the quality of its carpentry, which incorporates pitch-pine and re-used timber, the
barn is accordingly of special historic interest as it illustrates these two key developments in local agriculture (S1).