Building record 3112/3/2 - Barn c.60m East of Home Farmhouse

An early-mid 18th-century threshing barn

{1} Barn. Early C18. Regular coursed limestone and ironstone with corrugated metal roof. Single-unit 3-bay barn with central cart entrances under wood lintels, that to east elevation has been modified. Ashlar gable parapets and kneelers and C19 owl holes. Roof structure retains original trusses and purlins. Included for group value.

{5} The earliest map on which the barn appears is that of 1769 (NRO Map 832?) indicating that it either pre-dates inclosure or was put up in order to meet agricultural demands anticipated at inclosure. However, its form is unlikely to be much earlier. It is likely to have been built for Harvey Sparkes, who bought up most of the land in Knuston hamlet in the early C18th and whose majority ownership facilitated the process of wholesale inclosure.
Unchanged for a while the best early map of the barn is that of 1791 (NRO Map YZ 8056). Neither the barn nor the farm is named but the barn is clearly the biggest building of its group. The barn then appears on all the OS editions from the 1880s onwards, showing a variety of accretions and lean-tos which obscure it from view.
The barn is a simple rectangle, roughly aligned east to west, onto which have been added modern buildings at the south and south-west, with an older accretion on the north and an added but truncated wall on the west.
It measures 18.255m long x 6.399 to 6.449m wide internally. It contains very little architectural or structural detailing.
The walls are of roughly coursed, squared local limestone, with occasional blocks of Northampton Sand with ironstone, especially for the stressed quoins. The walls are 600mm thick.
The roof comprises five bays of oak trusses with tie beam and collar at the mid-point. The present roof covering is of corrugated iron, but the original on the steep roof angle may have been thatch. A C20th hayloft has been inserted at the south-east end.
The two main doorways are central in the opposing long walls of the barn. They contain no original timberwork. They do however show evidence of having been heightened, probably to cope with changes from wagons to a steam-driven threshing machine.
Owl holes have been built into each gable. At the south-east this is a simple opening, whilst that opposite comprises a bulls eye in brick with an insert of stone.
This cavernous threshing barn was probably built c.1769 and its surviving walls and roof structure have been little altered. Otherwise it became the core of a complex of ever-changing buildings serving Home Farm, which were mapped in 1970 at their greatest extent. The barn seems always to have been very plain and ordinary.

{7} Undated photo;

<1> Clews Architects, 1980s, Database for Listing of Historic Buildings of Special Architectural Interest: Northamptonshire, 5/200 (checked) (Digital archive). SNN102353.

<2> 1986, List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest ("Greenback"), G05 (checked) (Catalogue). SNN100394.

<3> 1769, Knuston Inclosure Map (NRO Map 832), (unchecked) (Map). SNN48685.

<4> 1791, Map of Knuston (NRO Map Y2 8056), (unchecked) (Map). SNN48449.

<5> Soden I., 2012, Archaeological Building Record of a Listed Former Barn at Knuston Home Farm, Knuston, Northamptonshire, p.2-10 (checked) (Report). SNN109630.

<6> Horne B. (Editor), 2014, South Midlands Archaeology (44), p. 36 (Journal). SNN109842.

<7> Photographs of buildings in Irchester (Photographs). SNN112806.

Record last edited

Nov 17 2021 2:54PM