Traditional Farm Buildings of Kent
It is difficult to travel around the Kentish countryside and be unaware of the wealth of farm buildings. Large aisled barns and oast houses are conspicuous, but the smaller buildings are also of interest. Now is the time to spot them before they disappear due to changes in agricultural practice and development pressures.
The Farming Process
The farm used to be a self sufficient ‘machine’, one function leading to another in a yearly cycle, ie crops, storage, feed, manure, crops. These functions created easily recognisable buildings and result in the farm buildings being arranged in a logical sequence around a stockyard. In Kent the farmhouse is usually away from these primary buildings and related to cleaner activities; such ancillary buildings as open lean-to cartsheds, the smithy, the hackney stable, the brew house and granary.
The principle was to winter the cattle in a sheltered yard where manure was produced that could be used to fertilise the fields. The old Kent barn was often on the north side to give maximum shelter and the great doors under the hipped porch would let the sun in on the winter workers threshing the corn. This job was done by hand with a flail and often by a ring of workers. Sometimes one can find the wooden threshing floor still left in the barn.
The next job was to separate the chaff from the grain. This was achieved by throwing it in the air whereby the draught from the main doors and a small door at the rear blew the chaff clear of the grain as it fell. This was kept from spilling outside by boards slotted into grooves attached to the doorposts. The remaining straw was stored at the opposite end of the barn from the sheaves of corn and the grain was stored separately in a granary.
The granary was a small building usually detached from the yard but visible from the farmhouse kitchen. Typical of Kent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a square boarded structure raised up on staddles. These had ‘toadstool’ tops to prevent vermin climbing up. Granaries were usually off the ground for this reason and to keep the grain dry, so they might also be over stables or wagon shelters. Inside, the walls were lined with pine boards to prevent the grain escaping and some had wooden bins with Roman numerals to measure the height of the loose grain. The grain was the most valuable crop and was used for next year’s seed, animal feed in the winter and for human consumption for both beer and bread.
The straw was gradually used up in the farmyard over the winter where it was spread to give clean litter for the cattle. This trodden straw and manure mixture was the main fertiliser and in the 19th Century some yards were covered over to prevent the rain diluting it. Open to the yard on one or two sides were shelter sheds for the cattle. On the rear wall were wooden mangers and racks for feed. Closed cowsheds would be where the milking was done.
The stables made up the other side of the yard and were for the horses who worked on the farm. The stable often had a central stable door and, inside, wooden divisions for each horse. There was usually a brick, drained floor. In one corner was a corn box and, in the other, harness frames. Nearer the house, away from the yard, was the hackney stable and coach house.
All the buildings I have described, except the barn, would probably be 18th Century or 19th Century, a result of the treatises on improved farming techniques and husbandry. They would nevertheless be built in traditional materials - those most easily available to the locality such as flint, brick, timber, chalk, ragstone, peg tiles and thatch (although there is little of that left and many such roofs have been repaired in corrugated iron). The barn would be in similar materials but often of earlier date.
Aisled Barns
In East Kent aisled barns prevail and these are often of considerable size. Their plan, with timber aisle posts, is unaltered from the house-barn of Saxon origin. This plan remained relevant for the great monastic farms and an important group of these large barns still exist today. Littlebourne, Lenham, Faversham, Wye and Frindsbury (210 ft long) date from 1400-1550. Some of the smaller barns are of a similar age. The plan and structure are the same in both. Timber posts are set in from the sidewalls creating two aisles and a central nave like a church. The posts are at approximately equal distance with bays between. Above the posts, tying them together across the nave, are timber tie-beams and on these, in early barns, central crown-posts attached at the top to a single collar purlin running the length of the barn. Also in early barns each pair of rafters were joined with a collar; this over-structuring, illustrated as well by the use of large squared timbers, gradually gave way to a more sparing use of wood as it became realised how little was really necessary. Queen-posts and clasped purlins followed as well as changes in the way the longitudinal timbers were jointed. It is from a combination of these various features that such buildings can be approximately dated. Eighteenth and nineteenth century barns do not have curved braces supporting the tie beams and aisle plates, nor wind braces in the roof. Their timbers are straight and sawn, not adzed, and they do not have that characteristic passing shore or long curved brace supporting the main post that was a characteristic of barns up to about 1650. Kent barns normally have coupled rafters at the apex. In the nineteenth century, however, ridge beams were introduced. These can also be found in roofs which have been repaired. From the outside these barns all look remarkably similar with long low roofs almost sweeping off the ground and blending into the folds of the countryside. At the ends older barns tend to be hipped and later barns halfhipped.
In the Weald barns are smaller - usually only three bays. This is because the Weald had small mixed farms. These barns are rarely aisled but will have lean-tos incorporating a cowshed or shelter shed and sometimes a corn box. On the intermediate area of the Greensand, single aisle barns predominate.
Oast Houses
Specialist buildings include oasthouses for which Kent is particularly known. These were introduced from Holland in the 17th century and were simply a rectangular building. Gradually experiments in improved drying techniques favoured first square kilns then round ones, and back to square ones. Their characteristic wind vanes had individual emblems on them. Such oast houses are from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Auxiliary farm buildings included brew houses as each farm brewed its own beer. Some farms in the Hadlow area in the 19th century became farm breweries supplying their own taverns.
Kent has few model farms all built at one time but there are the remains of one belonging to Sir Charles Middleton at Barham Court, Teston from about 1800, and a Home Farm, thought to be designed by Lutyens, at Great Maytham from 1900. Neither are in farming use now. Only in areas where there is mixed farming are the buildings still used. Elsewhere farms are amalgamated for monoculture grain production and the traditional farm buildings become redundant until only a fragment of tin original farmstead remains and the meaning and interaction of the buildings is lost. Their social and agricultural importance goes as very few are ever recorded and their landscape value disappears to be replaced by big corrugated sheds. The long history is threatened as farmers find it increasingly difficult to meet the cost of repairing their buildings.
This loss to the countryside and to Kent in particular (where the farm buildings are so attractive) might be arrested slightly by the Ministry’s recently introduced grant scheme for help with the repair of traditional farm buildings. The loss, however, is already enormous as are the real estate pressures.
A concerted effort will be needed if we are to keep the rural buildings of Kent in farming use and reasonable repair.
Orginally published by KCC in The Architecture of Kent by
Jane Wade