Farmstead record SXT 024 - Farmstead: Church Farm

Church Farm is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed Os map. The farmstead is laid out in a dispersed plan. The farmstead sits alongside a public road in a hamlet location. There has been a partial loss of working buildings with the remaining converted for residential use.

The house is listed at grade II and represents a well preserved timber-framed and rendered structure of circa 1600 which reflects the standard layout of its period: a central hall was flanked by a cross-passage and twin service rooms on the west and a high-end chimney with a parlour on the east. A smaller timber-framed range of the same or similar date projects at right-angles to the rear, abutting almost corner-to-corner with the main service gable. This rear range is attached to the house by a 19th century extension but remained detached in 1839. It consists of three bays, of which two are open to the roof with a chimney, bread oven and copper, while the southern bay contains a storage loft, It was converted to its present layout and purpose in the late-17th or 18th century and the present bread oven is an insertion of the early-19th century. The building was originally floored throughout and contains evidence of no fewer than six diamond mullioned windows that lit its missing upper storey; one of these is now blocked by the secondary chimney. The walls appear to have been lowered in height by at least 18 inches as part of the conversion process and almost all evidence of the ground-floor layout has been lost. Any precise interpretation of its original purpose is accordingly impossible: it may have formed a ‘unit house’ for a semi-independent element of the family (akin to a modern granny annexe), or possibly a bake-house of a different form with a central oven beneath an aperture in its ceiling – or even both. In its much altered form the ‘backhouse’ remains of interest as an 18th and 19th century example. The building’s most significant feature is arguably its external appearance with respect to the main farmhouse, which, despite its loss of height and the presence of two extensions, continues to illustrate a once common juxtaposition between a principal Yeoman dwelling and its detached subsidiary range (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.