Bury Barton Farmhouse

A large farmhouse of probably late 14th to early 15th-century date with 16th and 17th-century improvements. The building is constructed mostly of plastered mudstone rubble but includes some cob, with some exposed stone rubble to the rear. The chimney stacks are rubble topped with 19th and 20th-century brick. The roofs are slate, originally thatch.

The structure is essentially L-shaped with attached service wings. The main block faces the inner court of farm buildings to the north. It comprises the former medieval hall (now main living room and store) at the west end, a through passage and service end (now dining room), with a smaller and narrower dairy block projecting from the east end on the same axis. A rear east wing projects at right angles behind the service and dining room, containing a stair lobby and rear kitchen. A single-room secondary service annexe is attached to the east side of the kitchen. The building is now two storeys throughout.

The hall has a front projecting lateral stack. The service dining room and kitchen have end stacks, with the kitchen stack featuring a large oven projection. A 19th-century west end stack to the main block serves the first floor only. The main stair is now located in the through passage.

The north front displays an irregular two-window front with 19th-century casements with glazing bars, including some original glass. The passage doorway is almost central and contains a 19th-century six-panel door with a gabled and tiled roofed porch. To the right are two ground-floor windows, one to the dining room and one to the dairy. First-floor windows are positioned over the porch and to the dining room chamber. The dairy is recessed very slightly from the main front at first-floor level, though this recess fades out at ground-floor level. To the left of the passage door is the large hall stack. The left end is blind but includes a wide 16th or early 17th-century timber hoodmould for a now-blocked ground-floor window. The roof is gable-ended.

The rear two-window front of the main block features a 19th-century part-glazed six-panel door with a flat hood on shaped timber brackets to the rear of the passage at the right end. A 19th-century plank door opens to the store at the left end. 19th-century casements with glazing bars face the hall and first floor to the right. A 19th-century sixteen-pane sash (one with horns) serves the first floor, a 19th-century casement with glazing bars the kitchen, and late 19th-century French windows the stair lobby. This elevation is also gable-ended.

The interior contains the core of a medieval house with many features from the 16th and 17th centuries. The house has a long and complex structural history. The medieval fabric is primarily visible in the roofspace. Much of the late 14th to early 15th-century roof survives. The hall contains a three-bay roof extending to the present west end, where the remains of a spere truss are embedded in the wall. The roof appears once to have continued westwards. The medieval upper end has been demolished. At the lower (east) end of the passage is an intact spere truss, with some of the roof continuing eastwards over the service end and showing evidence of a return into the rear wing, where an identical roof structure also survives. A single truss towards the front carries purlins, ridge and common rafters continuing north and south. Over the stair lobby and kitchen crosswall the roof stops, with the ridge suggesting that there was once a closed truss at this point. The structural timbers are of large scantling throughout.

The spere trusses comprise vertical aisle posts supporting square-set purlins and bridged by a flat collar. Beneath the collar one long curving brace survives from the original two which formed an arch with daub-filled spandrels. On top of the collar a king post, braced each side by diagonal braces from the collar, supports the ridge. On the hall side a curving arch brace rises from the king post to the ridge. Horizontal diagonal braces also run from the collar to the purlin. The three trusses are identical. They are jointed crucks with unusual scarfed joints and face-pegged with a slip tenon, comparable to nearby Rudge Farm, Morchard Bishop. In the front wall of the hall the foot of a truss can be seen resting on a large template approximately 1.5 metres above floor level. The principals have a cambered collar with slightly-hollow chamfered archbraces below. At the apex a large yoke holds the principals which clasp the ridge (Alcock's Type H). They carry the butt purlins and single sets of windbraces. The hall roof and the fragment surviving over the service end is heavily sooted, indicating that the original house was open to the roof and heated by an open hearth fire. The roof in the wing is only slightly smoke-blackened if at all and may have been floored. The common rafter couples are collared throughout. The dairy wing also includes a similar scarfed-jointed cruck truss with the same Type H apex but no arch or windbraces. It has a straight collar and carries diagonally-set threaded purlins. The dairy block must therefore be as early as or not much later than the main build.

During the 16th and 17th centuries fireplaces were added and floors inserted as the house was adapted to its present layout. The hall stack is probably 16th-century but the fireplace is blocked. The hall was floored probably in the early 16th to early 17th century, and one of two crossbeams is exposed. It is moulded towards the upper end with bar-chamfer stops and chamfered towards the lower end. The lower end includes a tall late 16th to early 17th-century oak plank-and-muntin screen with chamfered muntins with runout stops and a central flat-arched doorway. On the chimney breast is a moulded plaster overmantel featuring an heraldic achievement in a strapwork cartouche with flowers and putti. The heraldry and flanking initials are thought to commemorate the marriage of John Bury and Mary Arscott of Tetcott in 1614. The service end dining room was renovated in the 19th century and ceiling beams are hidden. It includes a large granite and volcanic stone fireplace with a plain soffit-chamfered oak lintel and a blocked side oven to the right, probably dating to the 17th century. The rear wing shows mostly 17th-century features. The kitchen and stair lobby are divided by an oak plank-and-muntin screen with chamfered muntins with scroll stops. Two kitchen crossbeams are chamfered with straight-cut stops. The fireplace is blocked but is known to have a flat-arched lintel. The roofs over the kitchen and ancillary service wing are 17th-century with A-frame trusses with pegged lap-jointed collars with shaped halvings. A similar truss with dovetail-halved collar exists in the dairy wing. Some of the first-floor rooms have 17th-century moulded plaster cornices, often exposed only in the roofspace, which indicate that most of the internal crosswalls are 17th-century or earlier.

This house is important principally because of its well-preserved medieval roof. The first certain documentary reference to Bury Barton dates to 1502, when the farm was owned by the Bury family.