Building record 5993/1/2 - Home Farm, Cartshed

{1} Cartshed. 1900-01. By William Huckvale for Charles Rothschild. Weather-boarded timber-frame with thatch roof. 6 bays. Open front with posts with curved braces rising from stone bases. Queen-post type roof. Part of the significant group of the model estate buildings of Ashton built by Charles Rothschild. Forms a group with Farmbuildings at Home Farm, The Old Dairy and Cowman's Cottage (qv).

{2} Cartshed. 1900-01. By William Huckvale for Charles Rothschild.
MATERIALS: Weather-boarded timber-frame with reed thatch roof.
PLAN: Linear plan, and sited to the east of the main group of farmbuildings at Home Farm.
EXTERIOR. The cartshed is open fronted on its western side, and is of 5 bays. The west elevation has an arcade of timber posts with curved braces rising from stone bases. The roof structure is supported on Queen-post trusses, and does not incorporate a loft. The thatch covering has recently been completely renewed.
HISTORY: The Cartshed forms part of the Rothchild family's Ashton Estate, and is a component of the Home Farm complex, together with the main range of outbuildings, Cowman's Cottage and the Old Dairy. The Ashton Estate, stretching from the River Nene near Oundle in the west to Ashton Wold in the east, has been occupied since Roman times. In the C18 it was a well-known sporting estate, with avenues of chestnut trees planted in a cross as rides, and a number of fox coverts. In the early C19 the estate was owned by William Walcot and was largely farmed by tenants, with Ashton Wold continuing as a sporting ground. Neither Lord Rothschild or his father appears to have taken much interest in the estate, but when his second son, Nathaniel Charles (1877-1923) - known as Charles - discovered Ashton by accident, he was so impressed by the rich fauna and flora of Ashton Wold that he persuaded his father to build him a house on the site of the hunting lodge, and in 1900 Lord Rothschild subsequently commissioned the architect William Huckvale for this purpose.
Huckvale was required to design not only a house, but also an entire complement of estate buildings which included the buildings at Home Farm, the Steward's house, stables, gardeners' accommodation, a building to house a fire engine, a petrol store, kennels (now derelict) and a dog hospital. Most of the cottages at nearby Ashton were rebuilt to create a model village. The Rothschilds also became the first landowners in the country to provide their tenants with the luxury of both running filtered water and electricity, the latter generated by turbines housed in an old mill below the village on the River Nene , from where water was pumped to a water tower and so to the estate buildings.
The Home Farm has long since ceased to function as a working unit, and is now used mostly for storage purposes.

The Cartshed forms a group with the Farm buildings at Home Farm, The Old Dairy and Cowman's Cottage.

SOURCES.
Map accompanying Conveyance of Ashton Estate to Lionel Rothschild (1860), Northamptonshire Record Office 5173.
Map of Ashton Wold (c1901), in Ashton Wold House.
Ordnance Survey maps 1886, 1900, 1926.
'The Hon. Nathaniel Rothschild', obituary in The Times, 15 October 1923.
S. Wade-Martin, The English Model Farm, 2002

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION
The Cartshed at Home Farm, Ashton Wold is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

* HISTORY: The Cartshed is a key element of Home Farm model farmstead, part of a newly-created model estate developed by the internationally-significant Rothschild family during a period of agricultural depression which had signalled the end of farmstead development elsewhere in England.

* COMPLETENESS: The Cartshed has suffered no significant alteration, nor changes in building materials. Additionally, there has been little significant change to its woodland clearing setting.

* GROUP VALUE: The Cartshed has a strong functional and visual association with the other buildings of the model farm complex at Home Farm. It, together with the farmbuildings, Cowman's Cottage and the Old Dairy, were all designed for the Rothchild family by the architect William Huckvale as part of the whole estate development.

<1> English Heritage, 2000, Listed Buildings Online, 1743/9/10012 (checked) (Database). SNN105526.

<2> Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2010, Amendment to The List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest, (checked) (Schedule). SNN106694.

<3> Clarke S., 2011, Home Farm, Ashton Wold, Northamptonshire: Historic Building Record, (checked) (Report). SNN107526.

Record last edited

Oct 17 2019 1:54PM