(Described in the Appreciation as "Abbey Barn")
(Grade I listed since 1956)
(Grade I listed since 1956)
A tale of two halves. The western half, on the right, is basically "a 15th century tithe barn, much altered and refaced" (the 2003 Conservation Plan) ~ the roof, however, dates from c. 1700, when the tops of the walls might have been changed to allow the stone roof to be thatched. Before the alterations, possibly between 1760 and 1780, the parapet may have made the barn look even more like St Catherine's Chapel than it does from some angles today. JMW Turner picked one such angle when he painted the barn in 1795.
This half of the barn housed a "Rural Bygones Museum" from 1991 until the contents were auctioned off in 1996: after that, it provided a novel home for a Chinese Emperor's Terracotta Warriors until 2004, when the theme became the smuggling history of the coast, interpreted as an audio-visual display and a soft play area. In 2006, the barn underwent a major re-roofing exercise ~ originally planned as a simple re-thatching project (though "simple" is a relative term), a great deal more was required when it was discovered that many of the corbels supporting the massive beams were decaying, as were the timbers themselves, with the result that the entire roof had dropped a significant amount. Two seasons' harvest of local reed (12,000 bundles) was only just enough to finish the job, while oak was brought down from Melbury and limestone came from a local, re-opened, quarry to be used on the structural work. It says much for the level of craftsmanshp that the new timber and stone cannot easily be distinguished from the old (photograph, right).
The eastern half, on the left, has been roofless for at least 200 years, and has been repaired many times since. The wall dividing the two halves is 15th century in origin, and the barn may have been divided before the Dissolution in 1539. The 2003 Conservation Plan put forward some imaginative ideas for its use, but perhaps the tongue may have been in the cheek.
The back of the barn has two puzzling features ~ a "cart door" in the south wall which opens to a hilldisde far too steep for any normal cart, and a slightly mysterious pit, not apparently part of a water mill, though local childhood memories include playing around a water wheel here. The Conservation Plan wonders if the steps leading down to it may suggest that it was a pit used for treating wheat straw or withies. What adds to the mystery is that 19th century prints, like the one on the left here, show a sizeable spread of water around this side of the Barn. Perhaps the hillside might not have been quite so steep in the days when the Barn was built ?