Bank barn

(formerly Westmorland). The lower side of this example has four doorways, one now blocked, to different spaces for livestock Bank barns are especially common in the upland areas of Britain, in Northumberland and Cumbria in northern England and in Devon in the southwest. Brick-built bank barns are less common. In the 1660s, Sir Daniel Fleming of Rydal Hall in the Lake District housed 44 cattle in his long bank barn at Low Park. The cattle faced the side walls and backed onto a central manure passage. In other bank barns in Cumbria, the side walls entrances gave access to a cow-house, stable, and cartshed; some 19th-century examples have four-horse stables, root houses (for storage of root crops for fodder), and feeding and dung passages for the cows. As well as the true bank barns that occur in a small concentration in Devon, a variation on the bank barn is also found in Devon and Cornwall where the upper floor is accessed by external stone steps rather than the hillside or a ramp. Terminology The architectural historian Ronald Brunskill states that, although the British examples are older, the term "bank barn" is an imported term "to describe a type of farm building which is so common in certain parts of Britain that it has developed no descriptive term of its own". ==Bank barns in the United States==

Bank barns were a popular 19th-century barn style in the US. These structures were sometimes called "basement barns" because of their exposed basement story. Pennsylvania In the Pennsylvania barn, the upper floor was a hayloft and the lower a stable area. The Pennsylvania Barn is a specific type of bank barn with a forebay, a projecting floor on one or more sides of the barn. All forebay barns are bank barns, but not all bank barns are forebay barns. Robert F. Ensminger, in his book The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America, identifies three basic types of Pennsylvania barn: the Sweitzer, standard, and extended. The English Lake District bank barn is another type found only in Pennsylvania. New England The New England barn is from a different tradition than the Pennsylvania Barn. In New England, the barn doors are always on the gable end. The cows were on the main level, hay in a mow on the main level and/or above in haylofts, possibly grain storage on the main level, sometimes a tack room or workshop, and the basement was used for manure management and other tasks. The New England barn, developed in the early 19th century, became the most popular barn type after 1850, replacing the smaller, side-entry English barn and are almost always square rule framing. Similar barns are also found in upstate New York and westward Canada. Design has a ramp of dirt and stone. The design of some bank barns is called a "high-drive bank barn" allowed wagons to enter directly into the hay loft, making unloading the hay easier. Sometimes the high-drive was accessed by an earthen or wood ramp, and sometimes the ramp was covered like a bridge to make it more durable. In the Pennsylvania barns, the animals were housed on the basement level. In many other bank barns, the tie-ups were on the upper-ground level, and below the stables, a basement usually acted as a manure collection area. Many bank barns have a small incline leading up to the loft area instead of a ramp. Some bank barns are constructed directly into existing hillsides, while others are fitted with built-up earthen and stone areas to create the characteristic bank. ==See also==