Lincolnshire’s middle trent valley: the building stock before enclosure. The case of manor farm house, thorpe-on-the-hill

Abstract

Based on research undertaken by RUBL, a new building-recording group in Lincolnshire, this contribution originates in the observation that there are a very few standing timber-framed buildings in the county’s Middle Trent Valley. The paper is the first from a larger project exploring this absence. It addresses the suggestion that, although there were once similar numbers of vernacular buildings of this type as elsewhere in the north-east Midlands, this part of Lincolnshire was so greatly affected by a great rebuilding following enclosure between c. 1750 and c. 1850 that virtually all earlier box-framed structures were replaced in brick. Preliminary survey by the group suggests that this may be true, but it also reveals that some members of this earlier generation of box-framed buildings may survive disarticulated, as re-used timbers in those enclosure-period farmsteads that replaced them. Consequently, the group has undertaken a detailed analysis of the timbers re-used in the enclosure-period farmhouse at Thorpe-on-the-Hill in order to assess techniques for reconstructing the frames of predecessor buildings. Following extensive recording work, the outlines of two closely connected predecessor structures have been reconstructed and dated - through techniques including dendrochronology - to the mid-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is suggested that they were both ranges from the previous Manor Farm House, which occupied the same footprint as that still standing.