Modern Farm Buildings - Their Construction and Arrangement

Cow-houses, covered yards, piggeries, dairies, and the farmhouse itself - A. Dudley Clarke's Modern Farm Buildings sets out how to plan, put up, and keep in order every part of a working homestead.

Clarke was a land agent, and he won the Royal Agricultural Society's silver medal for his plans of farm buildings. First issued in 1891 and twice revised, his manual takes on the everyday problems of a late nineteenth-century estate: a homestead that has outgrown its layout, an old barn worth re-adapting rather than pulling down, and the awkward question of how good a building a farm can actually afford. Fifty-two figures give plans, sections, and elevations for each type of structure, from feeding stalls and open stockyards to Dutch barn roofing, poultry houses, and labourers' cottages.

He writes for the landlord and the tenant as much as for the builder, arguing throughout that a well-arranged homestead saves labour, and that labour saved is rent earned. An appendix reprints the model regulations then governing dairies, cowsheds, and milkshops. For anyone restoring an old steading, studying agricultural history, or simply curious about how a Victorian farm was meant to work, it is a clear and unusually practical record.