(now Balsdon Hall Farmhouse)
Parish: ACTON
District Council: BABERGH
TL 898 484
Not open to the public
Isolated in a gently rolling arable landscape on the Suffolk clayland plateau, the Balsdon Hall site is in the north of the parish of Acton c. 9.5km (6mls) north of Sudbury and close to the parish boundary. Lavenham is only c. 2km (1.2mls) to the north-east.
The manor of Balsdon is known to have existed in the tenth century and became part of the Long Melford Estate in the sixteenth century. An estate map of 1613 by Samuel Piers for Sir Thomas Savage (d. 1635), who inherited Long Melford in 1602, shows the arrangement of moats and buildings. One of the moats had been called ‘Chequers Moat’, referring to a chequerboard layout that is consistent with a theory that the site was an intensively managed ‘off-site’ food production centre, probably farming fish, for Melford Hall.
In 1839 the site and farmhouse were owned and occupied by Sir Hyde Parker, whose family had bought the Melford Hall Estate in the late-eighteenth century, suggesting Balsdon Hall continued to be managed for food production within the wider Melford estate. The tithe map of that date shows a farmhouse and farm buildings within a quadrangular moat that was broken on its southern side to give an entrance causeway. A larger attached trapezoid moat lay to the north-west. Fields and pasture surrounded the site except to the south-west where Balsdonhall Wood lay beside the west arm of the smaller farmhouse moat. The field to the north-east was named ‘Baston Pasture’ on the accompanying tithe apportionment and on the map appears to be a basin, probably an area of wetland that was the degraded remains of ‘Chequers Moat’. This is clearly shown on the 1884 OS map as a square moat with central pond separated by a narrow tree-lined strip, probably a walkway, and possibly the result of the restoration of the earlier moat. However, it is feasible, although unlikely, that there had been a cartographic error on the 1839 tithe map that mispresented this area and that it had continuously been a moat.
The 1884 OS map of the site shows the remains of three distinct moats: south-eastern moated area with buildings, including the farmhouse; northern trapezoid moat and a square moat with pond within it to the north-east.
By 1884 a distinct pond had developed from the north-east corner of the smaller farmhouse moat near the house. This moat also had a branching extension off its south-west arm that continued as a dry ditch to the north-west. The northern moat had narrow causeways towards the north-west and south-west for access to the surrounding fields and a larger causeway on the south side accessing the rear of the farmhouse.
The layout of this complex moated site has changed little since 1884. By 2016 the eastern and northern arms of the larger quadrangular moat had become dry ditches and the square moat was substantially covered in vegetation, a process that had started by 1905. Balsdon Hall Farmhouse (Grade II), which is believed to date to the seventeenth century, stands to the south of the wide causeway between the two quadrangular moats, with a cartlodge built to the rear of the house on the causeway. No longer a farmhouse but a private residence, its gardens lie inside the remains of the southern moat and still have the pond, lawns and some ditches. The area inside the northern moat is laid to rough grass with a track, now a public footpath, bridging the north-west corner of the moat as it was on the tithe map and leading south-westward across agricultural fields, passing the ancient woodland of Paradise Wood towards the disused Marks Tey, Sudbury & Bury Branch railway line, its route now a well-worn public footpath.
SOURCES:
http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=charter&id=1494 (accessed January 2017). Mentioned in the will of Aethelflaed, the widow of King Edmund I, towards the end of the tenth-century.
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/melford-hall/features/success-in-search-for-melford-halls-lost-owner (accessed January 2017).
Correspondence with Edward Martin, former Suffolk County Archaeologist, January 2017.
2015 Sales Particulars, Carter Jones Estate Agency.
1839 tithe map and apportionment.
1885 Ordnance Survey map.
1905 (revised 1902) OS map.
1928 (revised 1924) OS map.
2016 OS map.
2022 Google aerial map (Imagery © Bluesky, CNES / Airbus, Getmapping plc, Infoterra Lts & Bluesky, Maxar Technologies, Map data © 2022).
Heritage Assets:
Suffolk Historic Environment Record (SHER): ACT 002.
Balsdon Hall Farmhouse (Grade II), Historic England No: 1351941.
Site ownership: Private
Study written: January 2023.
Type of Study: Desktop
Written by: Tina Ranft
Amended:
