Building record EYE 198 - Barn at Cookley Farm

The site consists of a grade II*-listed farmhouse at right-angles to the road and a complex of farm buildings adjoining a timber-framed threshing barn 75 m to the rear. The house dates from the early-17th century but incorporates the re-used frame of a high-status early-16th century building with a fine first-floor ceiling. The five-bay threshing barn is a good ‘Napoleonic’ example of the early-19th century which survives largely intact with its original roof structure of staggered butt-purlins. Its walls are well framed, with fully pegged studs in the medieval tradition, but these are combined with newly fashionable knee-braces instead of arch-braces to the tie-beams. The central threshing floor was entered from the south, unusually facing away from the house, and the exterior was rendered with a lower storey of weatherboarding. The barn was depicted as a detached building on the 1839 tithe map with a probable stable nearby, but lean-to extensions of clay-lump were added to both gables and the rear wall in the mid-19th century as part of a new pantiled complex of cattle yards and loose boxes. A clay-lump partition and a new hay loft were inserted into the barn at much the same time, probably to create a new stable in its western bay. This complex remains almost exactly as shown on the Ordnance Survey of 1885, although its two clay-lump shelter-sheds have collapsed. The barn illustrates both Suffolk’s cereal boom during and immediately after the Napoleonic wars and the county’s subsequent diversification into the yard-based system of mixed animal husbandry known today as Victorian High Farming (S1).