Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire is a working estate owned by the National Trust. The visitor attractions consist of the Great Mansion, the gardens and the Home Farm. The latter was designed in 1794, by the architect Sir John Soane for the 3rd Earl of Hardwicke. He was one of many great landowners in the eighteenth century who became enthusiastic agricultural improvers and thus contributed to what is known as the Agricultural Revolution.
The Great Barn is one of the few barns surviving from any period, designed by a known architect. It is timber framed with machine sawn softwood timbers. It is eight bays long with two mid-streys on south side. Inside it has jowled heads to the wall posts, braced tiebeams and queen post roof trusses with bracing struts to the principal rafters. The barn forms one side of the farmyard a cart shed and granary, stables and cow byres forming the other sides.
