This farmhouse once belonged to a large house which faced it and served as the original Rowbarns Manor. The name Rowbarns comes from ‘rough barns’, or ‘the barns on the roughs’.

Crocknorth Farm
Image: HCPS

The roughs is another word for common land where animals could graze, and in fact the common land for both East Horsley and Effingham parishes lay all around this house. The barns in question would have been where the rents in kind were collected for Merton Abbey who owned the manor until the Reformation.

Inside the Lovelace exterior of this house is an old house dating from about 1600. Some of the timber framing is exposed, but most has been encased in plaster. Lovelace renovated the house to make it look like the rest of his estate with the usual flint walls, brick quoins and terracotta friezes.

He also rebuilt the farmyard and its buildings in 1874. The large house opposite the present farmhouse disappeared between 1784 and 1840 when the Currie family owned the estate. The last name the house went by was the rather fanciful ‘Cracknutt Lodge’, possibly alluding to Cracknutt Sunday, a day in October when the villagers went out gathering cobnuts for the winter.

William Currie replaced the large house with another in Green Dene built around a small farmhouse and called it Rowbarns Manor. It is in fact not in the old Rowbarns Manor lands but in East Horsley Manor. It was nearer the Turnpike road (A246) and so made a more desirable residence to let out to minor gentry.

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