Houses great and small

  With the exception of Old Hall Farm, the oldest dwellings are to be found along Low Road and Saxlingham Lane. The very oldest such as Rookery Cottage would originally have been small hall houses open to the rafters, with an upper floor and brick chimney inserted at a later date. Before about 1800 all houses would have been timber framed with thatched roofs, but now there are only six thatched properties left in the village, and some of the timber framed properties such as Manor Farm and Thatched Cottage have been given a later brick skin. Some of the earliest brick built properties were the old Tasburgh Lodge (Hall) (c.1780) and Mill House, Commerce House (c.1790), Holly Tree Cottage (1807) and on the main road, Tasburgh House and The Countryman (both pre 1818), with at least some of the bricks probably coming from the local Tharston brickworks. A comparison of the 1818 Enclosure Award Map and the 1840 Tithe Apportionment Map shows that all dwellings built between those dates, and subsequently, have been all brick, and that since then a few of the older timber framed properties have been lost, either due to fires or demolition. Fortunately most of the older properties are now Listed Buildings but many have been extended and others, such as Thatched Cottage  and White Cottage, which were two dwellings, are now single houses.

Details of many houses appear under the heading of Farms, Trades, Shops, Pubs or Rectories even though most are no longer occupied for those purposes, but this section includes a selection of others from the largest such as Tasburgh Hall to the smallest such as Grove Cottage. However the grandest property associated with the village, Rainthorpe Hall, has been omitted since it lies just over the border in Flordon, but its influence on Tasburgh is dealt with under the heading of Manors.