Farmstead record WLD 109 - Farmstead: Church Farm

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Summary

Church Farm is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed Os map. The farmstead is laid out in a regular L-plan with the farmhouse detached and set away from the yard. The farmstead sits alongside a public road in an isolated location. This farmstead survives intact with modern sheds to the side.

Location

Grid reference Centred TM 2821 4413 (66m by 75m)
Map sheet TM24SE
Civil Parish WALDRINGFIELD, SUFFOLK COASTAL, SUFFOLK

Map

Type and Period (4)

Full Description

Church Farm is a farmstead visible on the 1st Ed Os map. The farmstead is laid out in a regular L-plan with the farmhouse detached and set away from the yard. The farmstead sits alongside a public road in an isolated location. This farmstead survives intact with modern sheds to the side.

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.

Church Farmhouse lies immediately south of the parish church in Waldringfield and appears to occupy the site of the medieval manor of Waldringfield Hilton. It was marked as Chilton Hall on both Hodskinson’s map of 1783 and the one-inch Ordnance Survey of 1805. It is understood to have been acquired around this time by the wealthy landowner Thomas Waller of Sutton Hall on the opposite bank of the nearby River Deben, who probably replaced the old hall soon afterwards with the fashionable late-Georgian red-brick farmhouse that survives today. There is some evidence that it was occupied by his youngest son George Waller between his marriage in 1831 and untimely death in 1834, but by 1851 it had been converted into a pair of labourers’ cottages and its land amalgamated with that of Whitehall Farm to the south (creating a substantial holding of 255 acres at the time of the tithe survey in 1839). In 1881a shepherd occupied one tenement with his wife and 8 children while an agricultural labourer lived in the other with his wife and four more children. The house retains a handsome and largely unaltered facade along with an impressive number of original fixtures and fittings including moulded fire surrounds and a good ‘stick baluster’ staircase of typical late-Georgian form. It is accordingly of considerable historic interest, not least because of the unusual manner of its subdivision. A brick lean-to against the back wall of the main house is a later addition (possibly replacing a boarded predecessor) that presumably formed a separate dwelling in the 19th century as it still does today, with no access to the front range. This unequal arrangement effectively disguised the building’s conversion into cottages, hiding its fall in status from passers-by and the Ordnance Survey alike, with the latter continuing to depict the property as a single house. Much of the evidence of the lean-to’s internal layout was unfortunately lost to a heavy remodelling in 1991, but any plans of that period may yield important information about its former configuration and more evidence may survive in the dividing wall which is currently hidden by plaster (S5).

Sources/Archives (5)

  • --- Unpublished document: Campbell, G., and McSorley, G. 2019. SCCAS: Farmsteads in the Suffolk Countryside Project.
  • --- Unpublished document: Alston, L.. 2021. Heritage Asset Assessment: Church Farmhouse, Waldringfield.
  • --- Vertical Aerial Photograph: various. Google Earth / Bing Maps.
  • --- Map: Ordnance Survey. 1880s. Ordnance Survey 25 inch to 1 mile map, 1st edition.
  • --- Map: Ordnance Survey. c 1904. Ordnance Survey 25 inch to 1 mile map, 2nd edition. 25".

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Protected Status/Designation

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Related Events/Activities (3)

Record last edited

Mar 8 2023 3:46PM

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