Farmstead record BUD 016 - Farmstead: Bruisyard Hall

Bruisyard Hall is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed OS map and the Bruisyard Tithe map. Bruisyard Hall is a listed building and is dated to 1364. The farmstead is laid out in two regular U-plans with a linear range and further detached elements. The Hall is detached and set away from the yards. The farmstead is set alongside a public road and in an isolated location. This farmstead has survived intact with additional working buildings on site.

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.

Bruisyard Hall is an imposing grade II*-listed Elizabethan brick mansion incorporating the stone and flint-rubble remains of a 14th century nunnery. The uniformly pantiled red-brick outbuildings alongside were shown in exactly the same form on the Ordnance Survey of 1883 but not an estate map of 1879, apparently indicating a very precise date. However they had already been extended at least once and possibly twice by 1883 and were probably built a decade or two earlier as the 1879 map is a revision of previous surveys and appears not to have been fully updated. The structures comprise an enclosed stable yard with a stable and shelter-shed linked by a low wall to a coach house that flanked the entrance to the hall. The stable yard was initially reached by a separate track and was designed for working animals. Although stripped of their internal fixtures and fittings the yard buildings are unusually complete with a hay store at the end of the shelter-shed and a good battened window and brick floor in the stable. A set of characterful wrought-iron hay racks in the shelter-shed is likely to date from the early-20th century, while the stable incorporates an interesting and ostensibly pre-existing wall of flint, brick and re-used stone that also survives in the coach house. Although not obviously of any great age, the exact nature of this feature is unclear as it is absent from earlier maps. A lean-to range of small sheds against the stable’s back wall faces the house and preserves a copper with a truncated chimney, suggesting it was designed for domestic rather than agricultural purposes. The coach house now forms a typical example of its form, with a stable alongside a vehicle shed, but its current arrangement represents an early alteration of a non-standard building with a much wider stable entrance and three tall windows that would have presented a striking complement to the hall’s southern façade (S5).