Farmstead record WLS 024 - Farmstead: Crow Hall

Crow Hall, Willisham. 19th century farmstead and farmhouse. Regular courtyard multi-yard plan formed by working agricultural buildings. The farmhouse is set away from the yard. Partial loss (less than 50%) of the traditional farm buildings. Located within an isolated position (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.

Crow Hall lies in open countryside approximately 0.5 km east of St Mary’s church and is reached by an unmade track that was shown as a public road linking Willisham and Nettlestead on Hodskinson’s Map 1783 – which marks the hall by name. At the time of the tithe survey in 1839 it was a large tenanted farm of 146 acres, and the contemporary map shows a strikingly similar farm layout to that of today, with two complexes of outbuildings to the south and east of a large pond. The farmhouse lay to the east of the existing structure of gault brick which was rebuilt in 1880 according to a date plaque above its entrance. No buildings on the site are listed. Despite the similarity between the modern layout and that of 1839 the existing farm buildings were almost completely rebuilt in pantiled red-brick around the same time as the house. The stable bears the neatly incised date 1881 to an internal wall, and appears to be contemporary with an adjoining complex containing a coach house and coach-horse stable along with two narrow yards served by open-sided shelter-sheds. The timber-framed barn which flanks the horse yard in front of the stable was not depicted with its present outline on the Ordnance Survey of 1883 and was built soon afterwards along with a granary and a narrow range of pig sties adjoining the pond to the north. The granary retains its boarded grain bins on the upper storey with an original copper and chimney for heating pig swill in the ‘mixing house’ beneath. The farm’s current occupant’s grandfather leased the farm in the 1930s, when it was purchased by the Council, and he recalls the traditional names and functions of the various structures including the ‘chaff hole’ which projects from the stable and the ‘neat-house’ (cow shed) adjoining the ‘stock barn’ where cattle were kept. Although extended and raised in height as part of a conversion into a threshing barn during the 19th century this stock barn is the most historically interesting building on the site as it contains a late-16th or early-17th century neat-house of two bays with an intact doorway and no evidence of windows. Neat-houses of the 18th century and before are often mentioned in early records but are now notoriously rare and of great historic interest (S7).