Provocative Places: The Cottage Barn, North Yorkshire

Provocative Objects / Spaces

12 March, 2025 -

The Cottage Barn is a low stone building, clinging to an inhospitable crest of the North York Moors. It appears on Ordnance Survey maps in the second half of the nineteenth century as a tiny rectangle in the middle of nowhere; not unusual in itself, with field barns and outfarms peppering the Yorkshire landscape like daisies. And yet, as its name suggests, the Cottage Barn was first created as a home, a site of primary human occupation. Built piecemeal from found materials—stones and lime mortar sourced from the local fields—it is almost comically isolated, retaining traces of domestic interior design such as fireplaces, hand-carved alcoves, window lintels, and rough stone shelves. The specifics of its origin are a mystery to me; parts of this land were settled before the Iron Age, but my family only arrived here as tenant farmers in the 1970s. We glean understanding from the barn’s material footprint, which contains the aggregate lives of its previous occupants, but we cannot draw definitive conclusions.

Despite the obvious care of the builder, the first iteration of the Cottage Barn was never completed. The half-finished cottage was quickly converted for intensive agricultural use, becoming a byre, a stable, and finally a storage shed. It is now semi-derelict, undergoing piecemeal renovation when time and money allow, but lacking a specific function. This enables multiple temporalities to exist simultaneously, complicating our tendency as historians to think in fixed narrative terms; not ‘cottage → barn’ but ‘cottage barn’, defined by plurality. The harsh realities of rural life are starkly visible within these walls. The beams are riddled with woodworm, and the wind literally whistles through gaps in the mortar. It has a gigantic underground cistern and, like all farm buildings, a colony of rats. And yet, the semi-dereliction of the cottage barn is precisely what makes it an ideal locus for the exploration of layered human histories, the materialities of which perpetuate alongside vegetable and animal; it is a palimpsest of rural lives, its half-ruined state taking it beyond the constraints of more rigorously regulated buildings. To quote Tim Edensor, it serves as ‘a temporary rebuke to the notion that all space is abstract, the site of current or future production.’ [Edensor, p.8]

Rural communities retain a strong sense of occupational identity, even after those occupations have become obsolete. North Yorkshire has hosted an astonishing range of activities, from quarrying and mining to farming and military training. The human trace is everywhere. Rural ruins are wild but not wilderness, dominated by nature but not themselves natural. They tend to fall into the category of ‘picturesque’, rather than ‘wasteful’, although derelict rural buildings are widely perceived as having limited potential for regeneration. It is hard to conceptualise an optimal use for isolated shells with no windows, let alone any means of access to modern services, and long-term maintenance of the status quo is often economically unviable. The use and reuse of the Cottage Barn was cyclical, with each new function adapting the preexisting structure; when it was converted from human to animal housing, one of the internal doors was partially walled up to create an aperture for the passage of smallish livestock—pigs or, more likely, sheep. In the 1990s, teenagers hung trailer reflectors from the rafters to form a makeshift disco ball. My father recently cleared out one of the fireplaces, giving us a means to keep the damp at bay. Fragments of each period of use have accumulated in the present to create a map of change over time, a purgatory between built and unbuilt environments.

The discussion of derelict rural buildings is prescient in 2025, as we grapple with the size of our footprint on the landscape and our self-imposed segregation from the rest of the natural world. These sites, where the material past plays an active role in shaping the present and future, demand a flexible framework of analysis that can position this temporal in-betweenness at the forefront of materiality, place, and identity. The Cottage Barn reveals the importance of vernacular design in shaping a landscape which is intrinsically hostile to human occupation. It encourages us to consider the boundary between past and present as a permeable membrane, to make space for a ‘dynamic ontology rather than an ontology of fixed, immutable forms.’ [Edensor, p.19] It embodies an intense human ambition to belong to a place, to stake a claim through the redistribution of matter and to construct a material identity in the face of economic and elemental hardship. More often than we realise, new understandings can be found close to home.

Anna Bailey is a writer, researcher, and musician from North Yorkshire. Her work explores the intersections of memory and materiality, with a particular interest in concepts of place. She is a graduate of the V&A/RCA MA History of Design programme, and in 2023 she was awarded the Gillian Naylor Essay Prize for outstanding object-led research.

References

Edensor, Tim. 2005. Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford: Berg.

Goldsworthy, Andy. 2018. ‘Hanging Stones: Artist’s Statement’. Available at: https://hangingstones.org/arti....

McClanahan, Angela. 2014. ‘Archaeologies of Collapse: New Conceptions of Ruination in Northern Britain’, Visual Cultures of Britain, 15(2), 198-213. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2014.935129

Smith, Rebecca. 2024. Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside. Glasgow: William Collins.

Speight, Elaine (ed). 2019. Practising Place: Creative and Critical Reflections on Place. Sunderland: Art Editions North.

Started by the DHS Ambassadors in 2022, the Design History Society’s Provocative Objects and Places blog series looks at spaces and objects that challenge and confront us as design historians.

Past topics have ranged from the ancient Colosseum in Rome to the ultramodern Antilia in Mumbai; pink razors and Barbies to Lalique’s Bacchantes vase and nineteenth-century asylum photography. The full collection of previous posts can be found here: https://www.designhistorysociety.org/blog/category/provocative-objects-spaces

We invite submissions for guest blog posts from students, early career researchers, and established academics to those with a general interest in design history. Post can be on any object or place from any era, anywhere in the world, which in some way incites discussion and debate. Post should be 500-800 words in length, accompanied by at least one image with associated credits and clearances, and a short bio.

Please send to the DHS Senior Administrator, Dr Jenna Allsopp designhistorysociety@gmail.com