to tile-hanging or plastering as a cladding material was probably the need for economy, and it is, therefore, found principally on small houses, cottages, farm buildings and mills.
Weather boarding comprises timber boards fixed either horizontally or vertically to the face of the building. Horizontal boarding is by far the most common and most attractive, with each board overlapping the one beneath, thus casting a shadow. The boards are generally feather-edged – boards tapered across their width – and chamfered along the bottom edge, but other types were used, such as square-edged and, in the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century, beaded. Vertical boarding is far less common but it can be found on timber-framed church towers and belfries in Essex (Blackmore, Margaretting, Stock, Marks Tey, Good Easter and Doddinghurst), in West Sussex (Itchingfield) and in Kent (High Halden). The use of vertical boarding was also common on agricultural buildings: it is known that many of the early farm buildings were clad with vertical boarding (the barns at Frindsbury, Kent, and Upminster, Greater London) and the style remained popular in Sussex and Hampshire
and may well have been used elsewhere in the South-East. In Cambridgeshire vertical weatherboarding was used as a cladding to smock mills (the derelict mills at Swaffham Prior and Sawtry), while in Yorkshire it was also a feature of many of the postmills. Little now survives; there are the barns at Frindsbury and Upminster, and a few timber-framed granaries in southern England (one formerly on the Goodwood Estate has been re-erected at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum at Singleton) and a little can still be found in the West – for instance, the large barn at Malt House, Little Stretton, Shropshire. In these cases the boards may be tongued and grooved, rebated and beaded, or butted with the joints covered by narrow cover strips.
The cladding of horizontal barns and other farm buildings with horizontal weatherboarding commenced in about 1600 and has continued in eastern England and the South-East until this century. This technique, however, never became popular on domestic buildings until the eighteenth century, even then generally being restricted to the construction of the slight, timber-framed cottages built at this time or, like other cladding materials, (59) applied to the face of old
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