Folly known as Colin’s Barn, with associated boundary walls and structures

Folly with associated boundary walls and structures, built between the late 1980s and 1999 by stained glass artist and farmer Colin Stokes.

The folly is constructed primarily of concrete block and mass concrete, clad with local stone to the walls and roofs. Roof sections are formed from timber beams with pantiles or asphalt sheeting laid over. The building features timber plank and batten entrance doors and concrete and stone-framed windows in a variety of forms, some unglazed and others featuring stained glass. Floors are a combination of earth, tile, brick, and timber.

The building comprises an evolved, linear plan of interlinked one and two-storey structures extending from west to east, facing roughly south, with the boundary walls forming an integral part of the building's form. The principal structures were arranged as animal accommodation with a loft area to the west end, a single-cell building to the east of centre known as The Hermitage and used as a retreat, and to the east end a detached barn that is open-fronted to its north elevation.

The west end features a combination of arches and walls supporting curved and steeply pitched roofs, with turrets, dovecotes, nesting boxes, eyebrow dormers and Romanesque-style windows. The shallow-pitched, two-storey range to the immediate east incorporates ground-floor stone mullion windows and a stained glass Diocletian window to the first floor. The east gable end wall has turrets, offsets and nesting boxes and extends south to form an archway resting on the boundary wall. A single-storey wall continues eastward incorporating further stone mullion openings and terminating with a flying buttress that extends forward to form a pair of square gate piers surmounted by round turrets, each with a single nesting box and conical roof. Set back to the north is a two-bay structure with pointed archways at ground floor and a large round turret with splayed, square openings at eaves level and a bottle-kiln shaped roof.

The Hermitage is a single-storey, single-cell range with a pitched roof and stepped gable end walls. The west doorway is flanked by narrow rectangular windows with a circular window and a stone plaque featuring Celtic knotwork above. The eaves level timber bargeboard to the south elevation has cusped detailing; beneath is an arrangement of paired lancet windows set within relieving arches, with arched recesses beneath. The flying buttress to the south-east corner is of twisted form incorporating a dovecote and turret. Further stained glass windows appear to the east and north elevations.

The detached building at the east end is single-storey with two bays, a pitched roof, and is open-fronted to its north elevation.

Internally, the two-storey west end forms a series of linked spaces with supporting square piers and round-arched openings, featuring arched recesses, many incorporating stone shelves. Floors are a combination of earth, timber, and include a section of brick floor at first-floor level laid in a herringbone pattern. Walls are exposed concrete or cement-rendered, with some sections embedded with stone.

The Hermitage has a brick floor with an encaustic-tiled floor to the threshold. It includes a dry-stone wall effect winder staircase and a fixed seat. The walls are decorated with plasterwork animals and foliage. To the east end are rectangular windows with decorative ironwork. The building incorporates a series of hand-crafted stained glass windows depicting representations of the four seasons, signed and dated with a lozenge motif incorporating the initials 'CJS' and the date '89', as well as Stokes' maker's mark, the feather.

The boundary walls, of straight and curved sections, have a combination of cock and hen coping stones and stone slate capping, and include gate piers, arches, nesting boxes, turrets and flying buttresses as features. The section of wall extending south from the south-west corner of the folly includes two sentry posts with conical roofs containing nesting boxes.