Herefordshire Through Time
Herefordshire Through Time
Few farm buildings in Herefordshire survive from the Tudor period. In the 17th century a few planned farm yards began to emerge. The ideal was to have buildings on four sides of a square yard, but many farms did not have enough buildings to make up four sides. Instead, buildings were added and extended when required. Such randomly built farm yards can be very attractive.
The author Geoffrey Grigson describes the effect of such an uncontrived farm yard in very poetic terms:
"... if one stands back, and looks at the whole assembly of the farm and its buildings, at their arrangements one against another, their placing in the landscape ... if one considers them in time as well as spatially, in their kinship to generation after generation of farm workers and manorial lords, and land lords, one must again realise how little this agreeableness has come by conscious effort."
What sorts of buildings are we speaking about? With the agricultural upturn in the Tudor period, farmers gradually added separate buildings for horses, livestock, poultry and equipment such as cider presses or gin houses (a place where horse-powered threshing machines were kept from the second half of the 19th century). Eighteenth-century estate maps show the number and location of farm buildings and are a good source for studying the changes in farmstead patterns. Here is a list of some of the types of farm building you might have found on an 17th-18th century Herefordshire farm:
Not all farms would have had all these buildings. However, large farms might have had "out farms" providing facilities for animal husbandry and threshing for outlying parts of the farm.
With increasing grain yields in the 16th century, farmers built larger barns in which cereals were not only stored but also processed. The barn had two doors opposite one another in the long side of the building. The grain was threshed in the space between these doors with the use of flails. Sometimes the threshing barn was separate from the granary. In any case, the grain storage area was raised off the ground to keep the grain dry and safer from vermin.
A good example of an estate that contained most of these types of farm buildings is the Brockhampton Estate, now owned by the National Trust. A report on the estate has thrown up interesting and challenging conservation issues: "Modern farming methods, and a general decline in the farming economy, have resulted in increasing numbers of traditional farm buildings either being under-used or being abandoned altogether." (Michael Hill, Historic Farm Buildings, Brockhampton Estate, Herefordshire, an evaluation for the National Trust, 2003, p.7) Residential conversions can provide a possible solution if they are handled with sensitivity. Other architectural historians agree:
"A hundred years ago, no one would have seriously suggested studying, and possibly preserving, the humble farmhouse; now such a proposition has become a matter of urgency. Some traditional farmhouses have been brutally modernised with details like fake leaded windows set in white plastic frames and imitation coach lamps on a stone frontage constructed like vertical crazy paving." (Bill Laws, Old English Farmhouses, Collins & Brown, 1992)
[Original author: Toria Forsyth-Moser, 2003]