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The old yard at Pengwarthick Barton, West Cornwall - part of my model farm layout


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3 minutes ago, Cornish-model-farm said:

This is the old yard on my main farm, Pengwarthick Barton - a 350 acre beef and cereal farm in West Cornwall. Pengwarthick means "headland of the horned cattle" in the Cornish language and Barton is a Saxon word meaning barley farm.

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The turret shaped building in the foreground is the old culverhouse where pigeons were once farmed for meat and manure.

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  • 1 month later...

The barn is a Cornish "bank barn" which, as the name suggests, is built into a bank. Consequently, it is a two storey building at the front but just a single storey at the back.

The building directly behind the barn is what we call a "round house" in Cornwall, although they are actually polygon shaped. This one is an octagon, although pentagons and hexagons are also common. The building housed the horse "gin" (short for engine) which powered the barn machinery from the early 1800s. The horse or horses, were hitched to a giant wooden wheel, then led around in circles, powering a drive shaft which in turn powered the machinery in the barn. Stationary, barn-based, threshing machines were adopted in Cornwall quite early on because competition from the mines meant there was a lack of manpower to perform traditional threshing with hand-held flails on the barn floor. 

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HORSE GIN CAPSTAN.jpg

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That really is most impressive! I like that it represents the buildings near you not just generic machinery barns. How have you done the brick on the house I’ve never found a good way of doing brickwork myself but that looks spot on

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8 hours ago, Ferret90 said:

That really is most impressive! I like that it represents the buildings near you not just generic machinery barns. How have you done the brick on the house I’ve never found a good way of doing brickwork myself but that looks spot on

Thank you. Yes, the traditional farm buildings are all based on buildings on farms in my parish, apart from the granary, which is based on one in North Cornwall. The farmhouse was bought second-hand on E-bay and had been used on a Gauge 1 (1/32 scale) railway layout,  so I can't take credit for that one, although I did do some sympathetic restoration. The brickwork is a form of plaster.  

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11 hours ago, Ferret90 said:

That really is most impressive! I like that it represents the buildings near you not just generic machinery barns. How have you done the brick on the house I’ve never found a good way of doing brickwork myself but that looks spot on

I'm struggling with brickwork as well and a lot to do , I have found a silicon roller which has a brickwork pattern on it , in time I will experiment onto foam board which I have painted brick colour and then put a cement colour on the roller to put the brickwork pattern on , I  might try and score in the brick pattern  afterwards to give it texture , 

 

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3 minutes ago, Idle Git said:

I'm struggling with brickwork as well and a lot to do , I have found a silicon roller which has a brickwork pattern on it , in time I will experiment onto foam board which I have painted brick colour and then put a cement colour on the roller to put the brickwork pattern on , I  might try and score in the brick pattern  afterwards to give it texture , 

 

You don't actually see a lot of brick buildings in Cornwall. Farmhouses were mainly local stone or cob (a mixture of earth, straw, horse hair) but a few houses were faced with local brick from the Trelonk brickworks on the River Fal. A farmhouse across the valley from me has a brick frontage and was once the residence of a well-to-do yeoman farmer.

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