Agricultural shelter and stable

Summary

Agricultural shelter and stable, mid-late-C19.

Reasons for Designation

This agricultural shelter of mid-late-C19 date is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural Interest:

* it is constructed of local hand-made brick and with a graduated slate roof, and clearly reflects the vernacular architecture of the region;
* it is a relatively rare survival of a formerly more widely dispersed building type in Lancashire, that contributes to the richly, varied character of the English countryside;
* its interest is enhanced by its secondary use as a three-stall stable, that retains increasingly rare stable fittings including stalls and a manger.

Historic Interest:

* its use into the mid-C20 as an agricultural and itinerant’s shelter conveys historic interest and illustrates a now largely lost agricultural life and its practices.

History

This small agricultural building is not present on the first edition 1:10,560 Ordnance Survey map of the area published in 1847. It is however, depicted on the second edition published in 1894 and was therefore constructed between these two dates. Drainage of the Lancashire Plain in general was largely completed in the mid-C19 aided by the use of steam pumps, and it became an important region of grain production. Croston Moss was one such area, owned by the De Trafford family and forming part of their Croston Hall Estate. The building is considered to have been constructed as a heated, seasonal shelter for labourers involved in ploughing the land, the stalls for horses having been subsequently inserted. Oral testimony from local residents records that in the mid-C20 it was still used by farmers as a lunch-time shelter, and that there were also several other examples of such buildings within the area; historic Ordnance Survey mapping confirms the presence of several former small rectangular buildings of a similar size set in similar locations. It is also recorded that the building became known locally as 'Bogger's Cabin', named after an itinerant labourer from Croston who worked on the local farms during the mid-C20.

Details

Agricultural shelter and stable, mid-late-C19.

MATERIALS: hand-made red brick with a graduated stone slate roof.

EXTERIOR: not inspected, information from other sources. Situated to the east of a linear drain within the former Croston Moss, it is a small, rectangular single-storey, building beneath a pitched roof of stone slate. It has a brick-built chimneystack to the left gable, a single entrance in the end of the south elevation with a stone step, and a square, centrally placed opening near the eaves in the north elevation. Other walls are blind. The drained moss has shrunk over the last century or more revealing the once buried lower parts of the building including its arched foundations to the west gable provided to strengthen the structure.

INTERIOR: not inspected, information from other sources. Set against the west gable there is a red-brick hearth with a stone lintel and a tapering, full-height brick-built flue. A pair of timber stall partitions divide the space in front of the chimney into three stalls, one in front and one to either side. That to the right has mostly lost its boarded uprights, and the central stall has a timber manger fixed against the hearth. The simple roof structure has single purlins and a narrow ridge piece.

Sources

Websites
Historic Farmsteads: Preliminary Character Statement - North West region, accessed 13-10-2020 from http://eprints.glos.ac.uk/4016/1/Historic%20farmsteads-preliminary-character-statement-north-west.pdf

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