Reframing Rural Heritage

This thesis contends that heritage constitutes an institutional value system that generates authority, legitimacy, and cultural meaning through expert led frameworks, rather than representing a neutral act of preservation. Dominant Western conservation models, consolidated in the nineteenth century and later implemented through listing regimes and organisations such as the National Trust, prioritise material fabric, fixity, and permanence, frequently abstracting buildings from the lived practices that sustain them. Simultaneously, contemporary construction operates through globalised, technified supply chains that obscure both labour and ecological costs, while presenting demolition as rational progress. In response to these paradigms, this research proposes a situated understanding of heritage as a cultural process continually shaped by use, care, maintenance, and adaptation, particularly within rural and vernacular contexts where longevity has historically relied on ongoing transformation. Drawing on a framework informed by bioregionalism and adaptive reuse, this research positions maintenance and reuse as future-oriented practices of continuity rather than secondary strategies. This argument is examined through the case of Batworthy Farm, a dispersed Dartmoor hill farmstead in the parish of Chagford, which is interpreted as an active archive of rural architectural life. Instead of viewing Batworthy as a static monument, it is analysed as an accumulation of buildings, material layers, and working landscapes shaped by centuries of incremental change. Building on this analysis, the thesis transitions from theoretical exploration to situated inquiry, proposing a temporal reading of occupation and adaptation to guide restrained architectural stewardship.