Hole Farm

Hole Farm, Great Waldingfield

A timber-framed house of complex development spanning the 15th to 20th centuries. The building originated as a mid-15th-century service building attached to an earlier manor house, measuring some 17 metres long and 4.6 metres wide. It was substantially remodelled around 1600, extended to the west in the late 17th century, and further modified with a jettied cross-wing addition around 1970. The structure is rendered with a plain tile roof, hipped at the east end and carrying two lateral brick stacks.

The plan comprises a long east-west range divided by an entrance passage, with two rooms to the east (one on either side of the chimney stack) and two rooms to the west of the passage, a second stack, and the jettied cross-wing beyond. Rear projections include a staircase tower.

The main façade is substantially a 20th-century creation. The central door and all casement windows are 20th-century insertions, as are the rear windows including those of the dining hall (formerly staircase tower). This modern exterior masks significant earlier fabric.

The earliest phase is evident in the original timber-framing. The open hall was L-shaped in section, with its western half floored over. The chamber above contains an open truss with high chamfered tie-beam braces to maximise headroom, later infilled to divide the bays. On the east side of the former hall was a single floored bay, indicated by gable windows with grooves for sliding shutters. The first floor of this chamber remained open to the hall, with smoke entering beneath a tie-beam with heavy unchamfered braces. Above this, a solid wall of heavily sooted studs with wattle and daub infill rises to the collar, leaving a triangular area beneath the roof apex for smoke escape through an open gablet.

The entire roof remains intact and is of simple collared rafter construction without crown posts, with hipped gables and substantial original wattle and daub in its partitions. Remarkably, the majority of rafters and collars are reused from a 13th-century roof, likely salvaged from another open hall on the same site, all being heavily sooted before reuse. All contain empty lap joints for raking struts above their collars, typical of 13th-century or earlier construction.

The c.1600 remodelling introduced a brick chimney in the former open hall (now the sitting room), which contains a large open fireplace with bressumer. The remaining open area was floored over with common joists narrower than the 15th-century joists on the western side of the binding joist, now exposed in the sitting room. The bedroom above contains a smaller brick fireplace with four-centred arched head and chamfered brick surround. The cross passage at the west end (now entrance hall) was formed at this time, with a rear door featuring a four-centred arch. A staircase tower (now the galleried dining hall) was built to serve a new staircase rising to a doorway cut through the old back wall. The tower's close studding is exposed, as is a blocked two-light window in the west wall at first-floor level.

In the late 17th century, the staircase tower was extended north and the main wing extended west by approximately 6 metres, using reused late 15th or early 16th-century timbers. The framing is closely spaced studding with long tension braces. The 1970 renovation added a cross-wing at the west end, jettied to front and rear, and a narrow flat-roofed rear extension to accommodate ground and first-floor corridors.

The building retains a remarkably complete 15th-century roof constructed from 13th-century timbers and provides substantial evidence of its evolution from service building to domestic dwelling across several centuries of development.