Farm Buildings at Bottom Farm is a Grade II listed building in the Dacorum local planning authority area, England. First listed on 26 June 1986. Farm buildings.
Farm Buildings at Bottom Farm
- WRENN ID
- lapsed-nave-wind
- Grade
- II
- Local Planning Authority
- Dacorum
- Constituency
- Harpenden and Berkhamsted MP: Victoria Collins (LD)
- Country
- England
- Date first listed
- 26 June 1986
- Type
- Farm buildings
- Address
- Farm Buildings at Bottom Farm, Swing Gate Lane, Berkhamsted
- OS grid reference
- SP 999 060
- Coordinates
- 51.7446, -0.55314
- Source
- Historic England listing
Description
Farm buildings at Bottom Farm, now used for domestic purposes, date from the 16th century to the 19th century. The northern range includes a 16th-century barn in the western range that incorporates an older northern bay, an 18th-century traphouse with a loft at the southern end, and a two-bay 19th-century open shed at the northern end. There is also a 19th-century elevated granary at the eastern end of the northern range, which has parts from the 17th and 18th centuries that were linked and adapted for domestic use in the 1980s. The buildings feature timber frames on brick sills, are dark weatherboarded, and have steep old red tile roofs. This picturesque L-shaped group of farm buildings is located to the west of the house.
The four-bay barn faces west and has a gabled projecting porch in the second bay from the south, with a large winnowing door opposite on the east side and rear outshuts and stables under catslide roofs. The barn has jowled posts with mid-height rails in-line and unjowled wall posts at mid-bay. It features heavy straight braces to the tie beams and wall plates, with two purlins on each slope of the clasped purlin roof, the upper clasped by a collar and the lower by quadrant-curved inclined queen-posts. The older northern bay originally had a single-purlin with wind braces but was altered to two butt-purlins, with straight wind braces to the lower purlins. A squint-butted scarf joint is present in the wall plate, and old elm boards on the rear of the barn are preserved by the outshuts.
The square, single-storey 19th-century granary is raised high on two parallel brick walls and features a pyramidal roof, with a small window in the middle of each side and a central door on the east side accessed by a ladder. The interior includes a central north-south tie-beam with inclined queen-posts supporting the purlin roof, angle rafters bearing on ties across the corners, and long diagonal braces in the walls.
Local climate
Farm Buildings at Bottom Farm sits in a drier-than-average part of the UK, with an average of 720 mm of rain a year. This makes it drier than 83% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is lower than that of 83% of listed buildings.
It experiences an average of 36 freeze-thaw cycles a year, more than 63% 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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- No EPC on record for this property
- No sale records on file
- No related consent applications matched
- 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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