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
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.
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- No EPC on record for this property
- No sale records on file
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- Detailed attributes — period, style, materials, features
- Flood risk assessment
- Radon risk assessment
- Weather exposure and heating demand — rain and frost month by month and year by year, wind direction, solar and humidity
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