Farmstead record SBK 099 - Farmstead: Barley Green Farm

Barley Green Farm, Stradbroke. 19th century farmstead and 16th century farmhouse. Regular courtyard full plan formed by working agricultural buildings. The farmhouse is set away from the yard. Significant loss (over 50%0 of the traditional farm buildings. Located within a hamlet (S1-6).

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 barn at Barley Green Farm is a well preserved late-16th century timber-framed structure of exceptional quality and historic interest. It extends to a remarkable 23.25 feet in width and reflects a distinctive East Anglian form with a floored stable in the end-bays of a three-bay threshing barn. The building is broadly contemporary with the high-status grade II-listed farmhouse immediately opposite and offers significant insight into the layout of Elizabethan farmsteads in the region, having apparently formed part of a base court through which the site was approached from the adjoining medieval green. The floored section originally contained two or three bays but only one now remains with evidence of a separate door facing the house and no fewer than four diamond mullion windows – one of which survives intact. The unusual presence of a ceiling in the first-floor chamber and high-quality shutters sliding in narrow grooves suggest it may have been designed as a lodging rather than a hay loft. The 16th century structure was built as an extension to an older barn, but this was replaced a few decades later with the present eastern bay of the threshing barn. The relatively poor quality of this alteration is consistent with a sharp decline in the farm’s status, which in 1841 was a modest tenanted holding of 62 acres on Lord Henniker’s Thornham Hall estate (S7).