Ushaw Home Farm Pigsties And Walls Attached To East

Ushaw Home Farm pigsties and the attached walls were built between 1851 and 1852 by Joseph Hansom as part of a planned farm layout. The structures are made of coursed squared sandstone rubble with ashlar dressings, featuring cast iron posts and iron-clad wood posts. The roofs are covered with Welsh slate and have yellow ridge tiles, along with stone gable copings.

The long range of pigsties is located on the north side of the yard and includes wide entrances on the east and west. The south wall encloses an exercise yard in front of the southwest pigsties and continues to the yard of the southeast pigsties. The north range consists of paired pigsties with round-arched open doorways, and each has diagonally-recessed pairs of boarded doors flanked by square recesses above stone chutes leading to troughs. The front walls are supported by cast iron posts.

A round-coped wall surrounds the front of the pig-yard, forming a boundary to the road and curving at the entrances from the road to the farmyard. To the west, it creates an exercise yard in front of a pent-roofed sty with an open front, which is now partly blocked and has its roof supported on iron-covered wood posts. To the east, the wall connects to the east wall of a third building, which has a yard on the west side and a boarded Dutch door facing the farmyard entrance, along with a feeding chute on the north side and a hipped roof.

These pigsties were part of the planned economy for Ushaw College, where pigs were fed with waste from the college kitchens. A short wall to the east encloses the house garden and corresponds to the southwest pigsty, forming a walled entrance to the farmyard.