Barn And Attached Stable And Granary, Reignhead Farm

Barn and Attached Stable and Granary, Reignhead Farm

This is a threshing barn with an attached stable and granary. The barn dates from the mid to late 18th century, while the stable and granary were built in the late 18th to early 19th century. The buildings are constructed from sandstone rubble and have corrugated asbestos roofing.

The barn is a large rectangular building comprising four bays, with large opposing doorways positioned in the centres of the east and west long elevations. A two-storey building is constructed against the south gable wall, with the stable occupying the ground floor and the granary on the first floor.

The barn is built of roughly squared and coursed sandstone rubble with a deep, slightly projecting plinth. It features two rows of ventilation slits to the walls, stone gable coping, and shaped kneelers. The threshing doorways are tall and wide with segmental heads and curved timber lintels. The east doorway retains stone blocks with slots to hold a timber threshold at the base of the jambs. The west doorway is no longer external as a later milking parlour was built against the barn; it has been largely infilled with rubble stone, leaving only a pedestrian doorway. Square pitching holes appear in both north and south gable walls and also the south end of the east wall. A pedestrian doorway is located in the south corner of the west wall.

The stable and granary is built in a similar manner of roughly squared and coursed sandstone rubble, with a slightly lower double-pitched roof featuring stone gable coping and shaped kneelers. There is straight jointing between the two buildings. The west elevation has a doorway with a square, barred window to its right and a blocked first-floor doorway above the ground-floor doorway. The east elevation features two square ground-floor windows: the left window has a later glazed cross frame, while the right window has vertical wooden slats and a row of three small-pane lights above. A similar square window opening appears on the first floor. The south gable wall has a square first-floor window, now blocked, and a later rectangular opening with a wooden lintel and frame of four-over-four lights (unglazed) inserted above the roofline of a later attached building.

The barn interior has three hewn principal rafters with collars and slightly curved tie-beams, roughly shaped and chamfered. There are two rows of trenched purlins to each side and a diamond ridge post. The wall plates have been partially removed or encased in four rows of bricks. On the north side of the barn doors is an inserted timber processing floor. The south gable wall has a blocked doorway to the right and an abutting flight of stone steps on a brick base leading up to an inserted first-floor doorway to the left into the adjoining granary. Two adjacent brick silo bases are modern additions. The stable is ceiled with a large truss running east-west across the building and supporting the joists. Later brick and pipe floor troughs along the south wall, probably for calves, are present. The first-floor granary has plastered walls. The roof has two roughly-shaped pole purlins to each side and a similar ridge pole. A cross truss has tenons for ceiling joists, now removed.

The remaining agricultural buildings on the site, which include an engine house, originally open-fronted shed, pigsties, service building, milking parlour, calf houses, stable block, cattle houses, and a pair of semi-detached cottages, are not considered of special interest. They were built piecemeal over the course of the 19th century, have been altered, or lack evidence of technological innovation and architectural quality. There are also a number of modern sheds which are not of special interest.

The site is recorded on a 1799 Enclosure Map as having two buildings. By 1892, the Ordnance Survey map shows a yard flanked by a barn and engine house on the west side, with ranges of buildings on the north and west sides bounding the road and a separate building to the north. The cottages to the south are also present. The complex is largely complete on the 1898 Ordnance Survey map with some infill between earlier buildings. The complex was first identified with a name on the 1923 Ordnance Survey map, where it is marked as 'Sothall Farm', and it retained this name as late as 1950–1. The date when it was renamed Reignhead Farm is not known. More recently, the buildings in the west range have been demolished, leaving their back walls as a boundary wall. Alterations have been made to many of the other buildings, and various modern sheds have been attached to the north and east sides of the complex.