Traditional Farm Buildings in Upper Ribblesdale: a field survey

In 2010 the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority launched its Traditional Farm Buildings census designed to survey and record surviving examples across every parish in the Park, using volunteers. Members of the Ingleborough Archaeology Group (IAG) took up the challenge by agreeing to undertake the surveys in seven parishes around Ingleborough as one of the Group’s practical activities for 2010 and 2011. It has been estimated that there may be between 4500 and 6000 traditional farm buildings - barns, hogghouses, hennery-piggeries, cart sheds and wash houses - in the National Park. The final total will be known for the first time once all parishes have been completed.

The Authority gave a free rein to volunteers in terms of how they went about the survey, and some just did a basic survey from the nearest public right of way. The IAG, however, decided that we would go the extra mile by seeking landowners’ and farmers’ permission to carry out detailed surveys of all buildings including those not directly on a right of way or roadside. It is pleasing to be able to report that virtually all willingly gave their consent.

In a scheme that is now coming to an end, Natural England worked in Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESA) within the Dales on a two-year mission to facilitate environmental enhancements which included the restoration of some now decaying field barns, as well as drystone walls, north of Selside on the western side of the Ribble valley. Restoration work on historically important buildings in the Birkwith area is also underway as part of a Higher Level Stewardship scheme which has replaced the ESA scheme.

Aims of the survey

A National Park Authority press release asserted that the field barn landscape of the Dales is so iconic and so immediately recognisable that it is undoubtedly of European significance (1).

One of the reasons for commissioning the census was to find out exactly how many traditional farm buildings, including field barns, there are in the National Park, so it will stand as an audit and as a major resource for future research. It will also form a pictorial archive for the future which will enable comparisons to be made between then and now, and will facilitate greater understanding of traditional farm practices in the Dales.

The census is also intended as a tool for informing future management of traditional buildings. Possible strategies include encouraging farmers to keep field barns in agricultural use, though this is fraught with difficulties. Most cannot be used for over-wintering cattle as they are too remote from the farmstead or have doors too narrow for mechanised mucking out. Farmers nowadays do not have the time or the manpower to muck out by hand. Alternatives such as permitting new uses need to be looked at: for example, quite a number of field barns surveyed were clearly in use as sheep or lambing shelters, or as machinery sheds, and the potential of inserting pods within barns is being looked at elsewhere in the National Park. Merely restoring barns as valuable landscape features with no intended practical use requires both funding and vision: no one can deny field barns have an intrinsic aesthetic appeal and repair or restoration of worthy barns would provide much-needed practical experience in developing heritage skills among local craftsmen. In many cases, though, the stark reality may be that isolated field barns will decay through neglect or even be demolished as a source of building stone for improvements elsewhere. At the very least, though, a stated aim of the census is to guide future planning policy within the National Park, and the census will certainly provide detailed evidence as the basis for making a case for external funding on a National Park-wide scale.

Methods

IAG members compiled a very detailed photographic record of the buildings, mainly externally but also within if surveyors had been given permission to enter them. Detailed notes and sketch drawings were made wherever possible and any notable features were highlighted. These might include surviving cattle stalls with timber or Horton slate boskins, re-used roofing timbers, raised roof lines, and cruck padstones (large stone slabs set at the base of the barn side-walls, to act as solid bases for supporting cruck timbers). In addition they might include large plinths, wall furniture such as forking holes, mucking out holes, owl holes and ventilator slits. In some buildings graffiti were identified - dates or initials carved into timbers or partitions were noted in a number of barns. Members recorded approximate external measurements and, where possible, internal floor plans. The original and current uses of all buildings were recorded, as well as their state of preservation, using the designations excellent, good, poor, ruinous ... or no trace.

This writer also attempted to fit each extant building into a typology designed by Arnold Pacey, one of Yorkshire’s foremost vernacular architecture historians (2). Space constraints preclude any attempt to explain how barns were used.

Numbers

IAG members surveyed over 450 traditional farm buildings in our seven parishes. Clearly the larger parishes, like Ingleton and Horton, would have had more than the smaller ones but a second factor has to be borne in mind. Only Horton and Stainforth lie entirely within the National Park, and for logistical reasons the Group decided not to go beyond the National Park boundary in the other parishes.

The vast majority of buildings surveyed around Ingleborough can be classified as field barns: in Horton parish, for example, 48 per cent fall into this category. The balances were made up of barns within farm or village complexes (50 per cent) and other types of traditional buildings like cart sheds (only one), hennery-piggeries (two) and wash houses (two) (3).

Table 1 Number of buildings surveyed, by parish

Parish	Number of buildings
Austwick	40
Clapham	8
Horton	214
Ingleton	101
Langcliffe	14
Stainforth	67
Thornton	14

Condition

A sample survey in the National Park in 2006 concluded that 58 per cent of all traditional farm buildings were likely to be in a state considered unfavourable. Of 310 such sites surveyed by IAG members in Stainforth, Horton in Ribblesdale and that part of Ingleton parish within the Ribble catchment, only 32 per cent were classified as poor or worse (ruinous or demolished) while 37 per cent were classified as good or excellent. Of the balance 17 per cent have been converted to residential use and 14 per cent were classed as fair. These are encouraging data , suggesting that barns are perceived as valued assets by farmers and landowners even if they do not currently have any practical use. Those deemed to be ruinous are generally very isolated field barns often of a later date and lower build-quality.

What is of some concern, however, are those barns classed as in poor condition which make a clear statement in their landscape setting and have features of distinct architectural merit. The farmers concerned are almost without exception fully aware of the state of these buildings and would be loathe to just see them sink into terminal decay; but the reality is that in today’s straightened economic circumstances, and with modern mechanised farming practices, restoration or consolidation as found are not viable options if the only criterion being applied is aesthetic.

Field typology

Pacey drew up a field barn typology based on selective field surveying of 420 field barns, in different parts of the National Park, including a number in Upper Ribblesdale. He drew a sharp distinction between field barns and farmyard barns: the former were generally single-purpose buildings in a meadow for over-wintering cattle and storing the hay needed to see them through to the next spring. The latter tended to be multi-purpose, and near the farmstead, providing stalling space for cattle in the shippon or byre, storage space for hay either in the mew part of the barn, which occupied the rest of the floor area within the barn or on a timber baulk hayloft suspended above the shippon. In some cases, if a barn had a cart door on one side and a small door directly opposite, the space between the doors was used as a threshing floor for locally grown grain.

Pacey’s typology is rather complex, containing ten basic designs or floor plans from the simplest type with only one door, through those with either entry doors on one gable or two (occasionally three) doors on one side elevation, to L-shaped barns and those with a shippon added on to the original barn. These either have a long shippon in an outshut (or lean-to structure) along the full length of one side of the barn, or a small front shippon or loose box in the L-shaped extension. Perhaps the most complex barn type is the bank barn which has a cart door entry to the upper floor hayloft and entry to the shippon and mew on the lower floor level, with the two levels accessed from opposite sides of the building.

In reality the picture is rather more complicated than his typology suggests, though this is not in any way meant as a criticism: no partial survey can produce a full picture, and Pacey himself acknowledged that his sample of 420 buildings was too small for detailed statistical analysis. Table 2 illustrates the numbers of each plan type of field barn in Upper Ribbesdale based on the full IAG survey of 196 barns still extant and not converted to residential use. However, a number of barns could be slotted into more than one category emphasising the variety and complexity of barn forms.

Table 2 Field typology of barns in Upper Ribblesdale

Type of building	Number	nominal % of total	Barn name	Figure no.
Single door	23	12	Middle Barn	1
Two/three doors	31	16	Reyn Barn	2
Gable entry	32	16	Back Hools Barn	3
L-shaped	21	11	Stubbing Barn	4
Shippon at both ends	2	1	High Barn	5
Cart entry only	23	12	Foss Barn	6
Long outshut shippon	17	9	New or Far Barn	7
Cart entry + front shippon	44	22	Bridge End Barn	8
Cart entry + gable entry	1	1	Shaw’s Croft Barn	9
Bank barn	2	1	Thorns	10
Total	196

What is perhaps surprising - though encouraging for determining the statistical value of sample surveys - is that the percentage of barns across the whole survey area having two or three doors on one side elevation (16 per cent) is what Pacey’s survey showed (15 per cent). In general terms, though, the table highlights the fact that Ribblesdale contains a wide variety of barn types with seven of Pacey’s categories being well represented.

There is no discernible difference between barn types associated with field barns and those within present or former farmsteads and village-based farmsteads: numbers are more or less equal apart from in two categories. L-shaped barns are more numerous in field situations with thirteen examples compared to eight within farmsteads; while barns with just a cart entry were more prevalent in farms (eighteen in all) than in field locations (five examples). Overall, barns with both cart entrance and a shippon built on the front, as an outshut, stand out as the most common form in Upper Ribblesdale.

Dating

Trying to date barns is fraught with difficulties, though there are some pointers which allow one tentatively to place individual barns in a loose chronological phasing. As a rule of thumb small barns, often built of flaggy sandstone, in remote locations on land that was subject to a nineteenth-century Enclosure Act, are most probably coeval with the enclosure; whereas those built of limestone in or close to former arable or common meadows and known ‘old’ farmsteads could be much older, and possibly of seventeenth- or even sixteenth-century origin. Confirmation of this would require detailed investigation of roofing timbers and even tree-ring dating, together with examination of walls and wall plinths by building historians and vernacular architects. Barns are notoriously hard to date. Rarely are datestones found, but one at Selside has the date ‘1894’ inscribed into an arch and the barn does appear to be of relatively modern construction. However, as with many vernacular houses in the Dales, the date shown may simply represent a rebuild of an earlier structure, or the addition of an outshut, cart shed or porch to the main building. Older barns often have narrow but splayed slits, rather than squared holes, to act as ventilators but it is impossible to give precise or even broad dates to the former. Who knows how long generally outdated practices may have endured?

It is quite common to see re-used timbers in barns, with former cruck timbers having been re-set as cart door lintels or roof trusses. Documentary evidence in Wharfedale suggests that such barns had been rebuilt on the same footprint utilising existing timbers to avoid going to the considerable expense of buying new timber. Again, though, this may be premature - re-used timbers may themselves have been brought in from elsewhere. However, if re-used timbers - especially cruck frames - are found in a given barn along with surviving padstones and former steep roof lines, it is more than likely that the timbers were from an earlier building on the same site. Barns with probable in situ re-used timbers have been logged at Newhouses, Low Birkwith and in Horton village itself.

What is patently not common in barns are dated graffiti, but there are some splendid examples in Upper Ribblesdale. One barn near the head of the valley has a series of dates scratched into a slate skelbuse (4) partition along with series of initials, e.g. ‘WB 1728’, ‘CW 1728’, ‘TW 1728’, ‘WPIPEP’, ‘AGAGIGRCG’ and ‘WCTWCW’ (Fig. 11). They clearly relate to personal initials and the repetition of surname initials (P, G, and W) suggests familial associations. Another barn nearer Horton village has a similar range of initials carved into the timber framing of the shippon: ‘HM’, ‘J x L 1869’, ‘WM 1849’, ‘WR 1832’, ‘WL 1847’, ‘W.L 1841’ and ‘C J.C. 1862/42’. Were these perhaps men who had worked on the farm during that period? In addition, the same barn has the initials ‘I.R.A.T’ and ‘BNH’ inscribed close to a drawing in profile of a man smoking a post-1750 long-handled clay pipe (Fig. 12). So, were all these men whiling away their time in the barn on a rest break or sheltering from terrible weather?

The most exciting graffito can be seen (with difficulty now, given the passage of time) in a clearly old barn complete with padstone and reused cruck timbers, in the Ribblehead area. On a slate skelbuse slab (4) is etched a 500mm-long drawing of a galleon with full rigging and sails and possibly sixteen gun-ports. From close examination of the drawing it seems inconceivable that it was drawn by someone who did not have direct knowledge of such ships. Had a local man working on this farm once been to sea, or did a former sailor find his way to settle in this part of the country? These are not beyond the realms of possibility. John Horsnaile of Ingleton left a will dated 3 May 1679 (5). He described himself as ‘marriner’ and one of his bequests was to his former comrade Andrew Nayle with whom he had served on HMS Royal Oak ‘and the Bristol ffriggott thereof’. The will does not identify where in Ingleton he lived and it could have been anywhere within the parish. The suggestion here is not that Horsnaile made the etching; rather that seamen did have close associations with this parish.

Conclusion

‘Old’ houses always seem to have attracted considerable attention from vernacular historians - and visitors - and books and articles galore have been published on traditional houses, whether the thatched chocolate-box cottages so typical of the Cotswolds or our own flagstone-roofed, mullion-windowed houses. In contrast, barns and other non-residential traditional buildings have tended to appeal to the minority and the specialist. One outcome of the Traditional Farm Buildings Survey has been to emphasise just how interesting and varied barns can be. I have to confess that I ended up surveying the whole of Horton parish and much of Ingleton by default; originally I had neither wish nor intention to do it. However, it very quickly became obvious to me that, despite myself, I was thoroughly enjoying it! As described earlier, the National Park Authority has stated its intention to use the survey data in a future planning policy review, and in day-to-day matters. In addition, all data are to be entered on the Authority’s Historic Environment Record. Thus, it was a survey well worth undertaking.

References and Notes

1. Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority press release, 8 December 2008.
2. Pacey, Arnold, 2009-10, Yorkshire Dales field barns. Part 1: types and plans; Part 2: early barns & roofs; Part 3: landscape contexts; Part 4: gazetteer and index. Addingham, privately published.
3. A hennery-piggery is a small building on two floors, usually with an external stair. Pigs were stalled on the ground floor and poultry were kept on the upper.
4. A skelbuse is a vertically-set partition, of slate or timber, separating the shippon or cow byre from the mew; a boskin is the partition between any two stalls within the byre.
5. The National Archive Prob. 11/360 Ref. 219/220.

Acknowledgements