Norris Castle Farm, the bailiff’s house, cottage and walled kitchen garden

Norris Castle Farm is a model farm with attached bailiff's house, workers' cottage and walled garden, built around 1799 by James Wyatt for Lord Henry Seymour. Some of the farm buildings were altered in the mid and late 19th century.

Construction and Materials

The buildings are constructed of coursed stone rubble walling with stone dressings and slate roofs. Most of the windows on the principal elevations appear to be original.

Layout

The farm follows a regular 'double-E' courtyard plan of interlinked walls and buildings enclosed by castellated walls in imitation of a medieval castle. The walls extend southwards to enclose a substantial kitchen garden with square towers at the angles. The farmstead is arranged around two cattle yards with a horse yard to the north and a stack yard to the south. The bailiff's house occupies the centre of the north-west elevation. To the south-east of the walled garden is a terrace overlooking the valley of a small brook.

The Principal (North-West) Elevation

The symmetrical principal elevation is centred on the bailiff's house, which is square in plan, of three bays and two storeys with cellar. A central castellated clock tower projects above the castellated parapet. The central bay projects and has a round-arched entrance. The door has applied fillets and a semi-circular fanlight containing two pointed lights. The two ground floor sash windows are set in round-arched openings with paired pointed lights. The three first-floor windows are square-headed twin sashes. The clock tower has a domed metal cupola.

Either side of the bailiff's house, separated by a stretch of curtain wall with three dummy lancets, are a pair of square gatehouses with round-arched entrances with timber double doors. These give access to the two cattle yards. Outside the gatehouses, again separated by a length of curtain wall with lancet windows, are two castellated, square plan, two-storey, single-bay buildings: that to the north a cottage and that to the south a granary. The fenestration matches that of the bailiff's house. Beyond these buildings is a blind stretch of curtain wall with gates flanked by tall square piers with pointed heads capped with stone slabs. These give access to the northern horse yard and stack yard respectively. The elevation is completed by square, two-storey corner towers with round-headed lancets on the ground floor and square lancets on the upper floor.

Other Elevations

The north-east elevation consists of blind curtain walling with the main arched gateway to the walled garden flanked by two-storey square towers. Another square tower, with a battered plinth, occupies the north-east corner. The south-west elevation has a gateway with square piers identical to those on the north-west elevation, giving access to the stack yard, and a square tower, again with a battered plinth, at the south-east corner. The south-east elevation consists of plain curtain walling to the garden with only a small arched gateway with double iron gates giving access to the raised terrace which runs outside the wall, bounded by plain wrought-iron railings.

Interior Arrangements

Inside the curtain walls numerous buildings line the outer walls and divide the interior of the farm into the various yards and the walled garden.

The Horse Yard

In the north-west corner is the horse yard, paved with flagstones. It has a main stable/harness room range with a hay loft to the south-west and a carriage house and flanking loose boxes (later converted into saddle rooms/stores) to the north-east. The stables have a later 19th-century tile block floor and roof trusses with raking struts. The north-east part of the stable retains a boarded manger with feed racks accessed from the loft above.

Adjoining the horse yard to the south-east is a small walled extension of the northern cattle yard with a three-bay shelter shed range with arched opening. This strongly resembles the open-fronted stone-arched shelter sheds (called hemmels) used on model farms by great estates in Northumberland and Durham, and further north in the Lothians. A plan of 1880 shows these used for storing tools and timber. A small yard connects with the main cattle yards to the south-west and has a four-bay shelter shed for cattle against the garden wall.

The Cattle Yards

South-west of the horse yard are the two main cattle yards, paved with flagstones. These are subdivided by the bailiff's house, with its main entrance passing through a reception room for visitors into an elevated yard with views into the farmstead. This yard provides access via a building internally remodelled in the late 19th century as pigsties. This building is shown as a 'Farm Outhouse' on the 1880 plan, but in view of its location was probably built as a dairy.

Flanking the gateway to the north-east is a single-storey range which was built as stores serving the house. The room to the north-east was a wash house and retains its copper. The small room to the south is shown on the 1880 plan as a dairy, probably replacing the range converted to pigsties. Along the north-east side of the yard, probably added to the main stable range of the horse yard in the mid-19th century, is a cow house for milking cattle (shown as a calf house on the 1880 plan). To the south-east, along the wall to the garden, is a six-bay shelter shed for cattle with fodder rooms flanking a store shown on the 1880 map as a potting shed. These shelter sheds were rebuilt in the late 19th century with machine-sawn trusses and cast-iron columns stamped at the St Pancras Foundry in London.

The south-west side of the cattle yards is taken up by a five-bay barn separating it from the stack yard and connecting to the granary at the north-west end. The barn has a gabled central section with large opposing round-arched entrances with double doors. At either end of the barn are two vaulted passageways which give access to the stack yard. Off the southern passage are a root store and two smaller flanking stores while the northern passage gives access to the two-storey granary.

The cattle yards and horse yard have central pits for collecting liquid manure, installed by the 1880s but probably not part of the original design.

The Stack Yard

The stack yard to the south-west of the barn almost certainly served to stack timber for use in the kitchen gardens. Corn and hay, which was also stored in the barn, would have been stored in ricks in the yard. The stack yard has undergone a number of alterations. On the 1880 plan it is shown as a timber yard. The lean-to cart shed (to the south-east) and wood sheds are mid-19th century in date, probably replacing earlier cart sheds and possibly wood stores.

A wide-span cow house extending from the barn was added in the mid-20th century, the footings and feed troughs of which survive. The 20th-century concrete footings and feed troughs are not of special architectural or historic interest.

The Walled Garden

The walled garden is currently (2016) not in use and is considerably overgrown. A large glasshouse, probably of early to mid-19th-century date and used as a vinery, abuts the south-east wall of the farm. It has ornamental cast-iron columns decorated with leaf-foliage supporting the timber-framed lean-to roof and cast-iron floor grills covering subterranean hot-water heating pipes. In front of the vinery are the remains of two, originally glazed, heated pit houses which served as pineapple and melon pits. These each have a tall rear (north-west) wall (the bottom half of which is of red brick and the top of yellow stock brick); steps beside a brick boiler house lead down to a pair of pits. The southern boiler house retains its boiler. On the north side of the garden are back sheds, including a tool room, potting shed and furnace/boiler room.

Interior Features

Bailiff's House

The bailiff's house is square in plan with four principal rooms on either floor flanking a central hallway/landing. The quarter-turn, open string stair has stick balusters and mahogany handrails. Surviving original joinery includes plain six-panel doors with fluted door surrounds, window frames and sash glazing bars, and panelled window seats.

Workers' Cottage

The workers' cottage is rectangular in plan, extending south-east into the tack room/hayloft range. On the ground floor is a single room at the front and kitchen off a central hall. On the upper floor are two bedrooms at the front and an additional later bedroom adjoining the hayloft at the rear. The closed string, dogleg stair has matchboard panelling, stick balusters and square newel. Doors are plain four-panel. There is matchboard panelling in the kitchen.