Farmstead record BUC 121 - Farmstead: Steele's Farm

Steele's Farm is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed OS map and the Bucklesham Tithe map. The farm is laid out in a regular L plan with a covered yard. The farmhouse is detached and set away from the yard. The farmstead sits alongside a private track in an isolated position. The farmhouse has been completetly lost and working buildings have undergone significant change (S1-4).

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.

The site consists of a largely intact mid-19th century farm complex and the ruins of an ostensibly 19th century red-brick house. The tithe map of 1838 shows only a single ‘barn and yard’ adjoining the track with a pair of cottages on the site of the house. At that time the property formed part of Street Farm, a large holding of 217 acres in Bucklesham Street some 400 m to the south-west. The barn evidently operated as an isolated field or hay barn serving an area of meadow land immediately to the east. The farm’s present name first appeared on the Ordnance Survey of 1902 and may commemorate John Steel, a respected veterinary surgeon who worked in the village for much of the 19th century but had no obvious direct connection with the site. The various farm buildings are uniformly timber-framed, weatherboarded and pantiled, and were constructed at or about the same time in the 1850s or 60s as a ‘model farm’ - to serve the newly fashionable system of semi-industrial mixed animal husbandry known today as Victorian High Farming. It is unclear whether the property remained part of Street Farm or had become independent. A three-bay threshing barn which retains a gault-brick threshing floor and its original cast iron brackets lies to the north of the complex with a stable adjoining on the east and two ranges of single-storied sheds divided into loose boxes enclosing a small yard on the south. The southern range faced another enclosed yard that no longer survives to the south of the complex and was clearly designed for cattle, while two boxes in the western range were tall enough for horses. The western shed also contained a small pig sty with evidence of a plastered farrowing box. The complex remains almost complete, having lost only this pig sty and a small shed that projected to the north of the stable, and is in generally good condition (S5).