Barn again – this ancient survivor has bright future

A quick turn out of the flying traffic near Ardsley on the Barnsley road takes you on to a pot-holed track. It sweeps down steeply to a snug spot where people have been farming for the best part of a millennium.

The legacy of generations is still here – a stone farmhouse, a mill, a mill pond and a cruck barn.

Most of the buildings have a use today, apart from the barn, whose sole purpose is to provide a home for a barn owl. These barns were built from Anglo Saxon times onwards and this one would once have been the principal agricultural building on the estate. When the present farmer's wife, Helen Rhodes, first came here it was her dream to do something with it. Now she can.

Natural England is spending 250,000 to sort out the barn and, when completed, it will play a key role in Helen's education programme for school children. It has taken her ten years to get this far. "I can't quite believe it's going to happen," says Helen. "I rang every funding body I could find. But we had to be a trust, or publicly owned. There was always some box we didn't tick."

The barn is open to the sky near one of the remaining crucks – the massive A-frames which go from the top of the building to the ground. Dr Margaret Nieke's eyes light up as she gazes at the mighty roof, still mostly intact, whose main timbers were cut from single oak trees.

"It's a wonderful survivor, lots have been turned into houses," says Dr Nieke, Natural England's historic environment adviser for this region. "This is significant and important and it's an opportunity to catch it in time and restore it to its former glory. Cruck barns were commonplace in the medieval period, although there were few like this in a lowland context. It was a high-status barn for wealthy types.

"It's really exciting, one that slipped through the net. People forget there are pockets of survival and it's good to have caught one. There are few of this scale and quality."

The cross-saws and adzes which fashioned these timbers were held by men working on the estate of the Bosville family. They first made their mark around here in the 1370s. A couple of centuries later, Godfrey Bosville put up a timber-framed home for himself called New Hall. The farm takes its name from that. The Bosvilles also had holdings in the Pennines which probably explains why a style of barn usually found in the uplands came to be built down here.

New Hall itself was gutted by a fire and knocked down in the 19h century. Its replacement, Cranford Hall, is a home unconnected with the farm today.

One of the barn's main jobs would have been to store grain. Stone flags are still in place where the corn would be threshed, with gaps in the walls for a draught to blow away the chaff. One of the crucks is obscured by a dividing wall to create a space last occupied by a piggery unit. The barn has damp problems because of the concrete floor and some of the exterior brickwork has eroded due to the cement mortar used in modern pointing.

There are various botched jobs including an opening constructed out of shiny red industrial brick. The stone plinths on which the main cruck stands look a bit casual too. But it turns out these are called padstones and what they reveal is that medieval builders knew a thing or two about structural engineering.

All the modern additions will be swept away when the workmen get cracking, probably in the late summer. It's good news for the resident barn owl. The work will incorporate an owl loft.

It's going to be expensive. Natural England's quarter of a million, made available under their Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) programme, makes up the bulk of the funding.

But it only meets 80 per cent of the total cost. "That's quite a shortfall for an owner to pick up and Helen was not able to match the funding," says Dr Nieke. "She was so passionate to do it and looked for additional grant aid. There are not that many around who can help."

Step forward the Country Houses Foundation, based in Dursley in Gloucestershire. This organisation gives grants for the conservation of buildings, usually big country houses. They have offered a grant which makes this their first agricultural building. It will pay half of the shortfall – making it do-able at last for Helen and her husband David.

"I love old buildings," says Helen. "It's been a long, ongoing dream and it's fantastic to get this support and this funding. We wouldn't have been able to scratch the surface on our own. We want to retain as much of the original fabric as possible. If we want it to survive another 500 years it will have to have breathability." The family she married into in 1988 came from Scotland and have farmed here since 1953. They have 800 acres, 400 on the block where the cruck barn stands, which has been in countryside stewardship since the 1980s. It's all arable, the dairy cattle they had have all gone and the only livestock remaining are half a dozen sheep.

There's no doubt about Helen's commitment and durability when it comes to restoring old farm buildings. She and David have been living in a caravan for the past four years while they turn the farm's old mill into a home.

Her husband's parents live in the stone farmhouse, having handed the farm over to David and his brother Douglas who set up another farm. Helen has always always done school visits and currently can cope with groups of 30 a day, mostly primary school children.

She also has open days with the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and FWAG, the farming and wildlife advisory group. The cruck barn, which should be ready by this time next year, means she is thinking more ambitiously. There may be a link to explore with the RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve which is not far away.

This is an area which has issues with poaching and vandalism and lads who will come out and kill three barn owls for fun. An educational open door policy can also pay dividends in that respect. "It gets the word to the wider community about what we are doing and it can help reduce damage," says Helen. "For instance people don't understand why they shouldn't let their dogs run on the grass margins of the fields. They need to be told it's because there are grey partridges and if they do they lose the nests."

If you have a venerable project of your own which might benefit from Natural England cash, be warned. Their ring-fenced budget is half a million pounds a year. So they can't do many.