Eastern Barn at Church Farm, 50 Metres South East of Parish Church is a Grade II* listed building in the Dacorum local planning authority area, England. First listed on 21 February 1978. A C15 Barn.

Eastern Barn at Church Farm, 50 Metres South East of Parish Church

WRENN ID
young-spindle-jet
Grade
II*
Local Planning Authority
Dacorum
Constituency
Harpenden and Berkhamsted MP: Victoria Collins (LD)
Country
England
Date first listed
21 February 1978
Type
Barn
Address
Eastern Barn at Church Farm, 50 Metres South East of Parish Church, HP1 3BY
OS grid reference
TL 029 112
Coordinates
51.79017, -0.50923
Source
Historic England listing

Also on this page: flood risk · radon risk · weather exposure · detailed attributes ↓

Description

The Eastern Barn at Church Farm, located 50 meters southeast of the Parish Church, is a late medieval barn, likely built in the 15th century. It features a cruck frame and has been extended to form an L-plan with a southern range added in three stages during the 17th century. The older eastern range was renovated in the 18th century, with its ends rebuilt. The barn is constructed with a timber frame on low brick sill walls, covered in dark weatherboarding, and topped with steep old red tile roofs.

This five-bay cruck-framed barn faces west into a courtyard and retains four of its original cruck frames. Each truss has a different apex treatment, and there is a heavy diagonally-set ridge timber. The barn has a single purlin on each side, set in the plane of the roofslope, which is trenched through the backs of the crucks and splay-scarfed at each truss, with each part pegged to the cruck. There are lap-dovetail mortices on the north face of each cruck for a collar, which is now missing, along with spur-ties that are lap-jointed to the north face of the cruck and to the wall-post below the wallplate level. Modern timbers have been bolted across as tie-beams, likely due to the removal of the collars.

The barn features long convex curved wind-braces that overlap at the junction with the back of the cruck blade. Each pair of cruck blades consists of matched halves from a single timber. The southernmost pair is joined just below the apex by a small lap-jointed collar, with the blades continuing to butt against the lower faces of the ridge-beam. The next pair to the north rises and crosses with the ridge supported in the crotch, while another has a yoke at the apex with a short post supporting the ridge. The wallplate has squint-butted scarf joints. The western end of the southern range includes a two-bay structure with a butt-purlin roof, diminished principals, and angled straight queen-posts at the middle truss. This cruck barn is one of the most southeastern examples of this construction style and was largely dismantled for reconstruction as a craft shop when last inspected.

Local climate

Eastern Barn at Church Farm, 50 Metres South East of Parish Church sits in a drier-than-average part of the UK, with an average of 730 mm of rain a year. This makes it drier than 78% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is lower than that of 77% of listed buildings.

It experiences an average of 36 freeze-thaw cycles a year, more than 64% of listed buildings. Of these, 17 follow at least 1 mm of rain in the preceding 48 hours. Average temperatures at this location have risen by 0.3°C per decade since 1991.

Averages for 1991–2020; temperature trend 1991–2025. Figures describe the wider area (a grid cell of roughly 10 km), not the individual site. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026.

More on this building

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