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Harmondsworth Great Barn (also known as Manor Farm Barn) is a medieval tithe barn on the former Manor Farm in the village of Harmondsworth, in the London Borough of Hillingdon, England (previously part of the historic county of Middlesex). It is north-west of fields and the A4 next to Heathrow Airport. Built in the early 15th century by Winchester College, it is the largest timber-framed building in England and is regarded as an outstanding example of medieval carpentry. It was described by the English poet John Betjeman as the "Cathedral of Middlesex". A similar though smaller barn is part of the Manor Farm complex in Ruislip. The barn was briefly in royal ownership but passed into the hands of three families who continued to used it for agricultural purposes until as late as the 1970s. It was subsequently owned by a property development company which redeveloped the farm complex. After the company went bankrupt in 2006, the barn was bought by property speculators betting on its compensation value if the nearby Heathrow Airport was expanded. The barn fell into disrepair and was closed to the public for all but one day a year. English Heritage stepped in, using a rare legal procedure to carry out repairs without the owner's consent, and eventually purchased the barn in January 2012. It is now open to the public from April to October on the second and fourth Sunday of each month under the management of the Friends of the Great Barn group. ==Structure== The barn measures long, wide, and high, with twelve bays, running in a north–south direction.〔 It occupies a footprint of about and has an internal volume of about .〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Significance of Harmondsworth Barn )〕 There are three doors on the east side to permit the entry of wagons. The exterior of the barn is weatherboarded, with a hipped tiled roof. It was originally a much larger structure, with two wings, but the north wing was dismantled in 1774 and rebuilt in the now-demolished hamlet of Heathrow, on the site of the modern airport. The vast majority of the surviving structure is original; it has been estimated that 95 per cent of the timbers, including the external weatherboarding, have survived from the original building. It has been described by English Heritage as "a supreme example of late-medieval craftsmanship – a masterpiece of carpentry containing one of the best and most intact interiors of its age and type in all of Europe."〔 It is an outstanding example of a late medieval aisled barn and is the largest timber-framed building in England. Barns of this type were based on a longitudinal frame, with two rows of posts connected by arcade plates. Because such barns tend to be both long and high, they experience high structural loads from the wind. They therefore have numerous internal braces, acting in much the same way as buttresses, to strengthen the structure. This gives the barn its distinctive internal appearance, with a lattice of beams and braces holding up the roof. The techniques used in its construction are similar to those employed on the great cathedrals being built at the time, and some of the same craftsmen were probably involved. The barn's main posts are made of oak. Each is about square and sits on a block of Reigate sandstone, a common building material in medieval London. The posts were cut into shape using axes, adzes and saws, the marks from which can still be seen in some instances. The builders cut and fitted the timberwork together on the ground and scratched Roman numerals, called assembly marks, on the joints to indicate where pieces of timber were to be combined. Some of the pairs of main posts were made from the trunks of very large individual trees which were cut in two. They were all placed upside down, relative to the original direction of the tree. This was because the bottom of a tree is always wider than the top; the greater width was needed to accommodate the joints with the beams that support the roof.〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=Friends of the Great Barn at Harmondsworth )〕 Despite the care that the builders took to get the joints right, they may have made some mistakes along the way, as some of the timbers have holes for pegs and mortises that were never used. Alternatively, the timbers may have been reused from another construction.〔 The rows of arcade posts support tie beams, with curved braces to strengthen the frame. The collar beam, which supports the opposing principal rafters, is supported by the crown post. Roof purlins run the length of the barn and are tenoned into the principal rafters, with additional support from curved wind braces.〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=English Heritage )〕 Some aspects of this design are unusual, both in the way that they are executed and in terms of their early date. A number of features in the barn's carpentry are described by English Heritage as "experimental, precocious and regionally unusual," which is attributed to the very high level of skill of the master carpenters who built it.〔 The use of aisles enabled the barn's architects to increase its width and by doing so, provided the maximum space for threshing floors. The longer the barn was, the more threshing floors could be provided. English barns went through an evolution in the number of threshing floors; the earliest had just one central floor, a design that became the commonest to be found in Britain. Harmondsworth Great Barn is unusual in having three threshing floors, allowing much more grain to be threshed at one time. The boards on the exterior of the barn are made from a mixture of oak, elm and softwoods such as pine and fir. Some are of modern or relatively modern origins; those on the south end of the barn are noticeably lighter in colour than the rest and are the result of the repairs made after the 1972 fire. Each side of the barn's roof holds 92 tile courses and a total of around 76,000 tiles, which were originally held in place by oak pegs. Many of the tiles have been replaced over the years and the oak pegs have been replaced by galvanised peg nails due to the effects of decay.〔 The floor of the barn was originally made of hard-packed flint gravel held together with iron panning, excavated from a local gravel deposit, which was used as a more readily available alternative to stone. In subsequent years it was repaired with brick, tile and, ultimately, cement, obscuring the original appearance of the floor. An indication of how it would have looked can still be obtained from the outside of the west side of the barn.〔 The design of the barn has provided inspiration to a number of architects in the 19th and 20th centuries who were involved with the Gothic Revival movement. Sir George Gilbert Scott visited the barn in 1850 and sketched it, using its design as the basis for proposals for the new ChristChurch Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand. The library of Mansfield College, Oxford designed by Basil Champneys in the late 1880s also owes its inspiration to the barn. Bedales School's library, completed in 1922 and designed by Ernest Gimson, may also have had its origins in the barn's design.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Harmondsworth Great Barn」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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