Drive through Kent or East Sussex for half an hour and you will pass one: a squat brick round or square, a steep conical roof, and a white cowl at the top that looks like a hat put on in a hurry. Oast houses are the most recognisable working buildings in this part of England, and almost none of them are still doing the job they were built for.
The job was drying hops. Hops come off the bine wet, and wet hops spoil. The oast was the machine that solved it: a kiln with a fire below, a slatted drying floor above, and hops spread out on hair cloth over the slats so that heat could rise evenly through them. Warm air went up through the crop, took the moisture with it, and left by the opening at the top. What the building is, structurally, is a chimney with a floor in it.
The cowl is the clever part, and the part everyone photographs. It is a hood on a spindle with a vane attached, and it turns with the wind so that its opening always faces away from the weather. Wind across the opening draws air up the kiln; wind into it would stall the draught and stop the drying. So the cowl swings round, on the wind’s instruction, keeping the opening on the sheltered side. Nobody operates it. It has been managing its own affairs for as long as it has stood there.
Alongside the kiln sat the stowage: the taller barn-like part where dried hops were cooled, pressed into pockets and stored. Most oasts you see are really two buildings joined — the round or square kiln for the heat, the rectangular stowage for everything before and after it. Single-kiln oasts, with one round kiln and one stowage, belonged to smaller holdings; the great hop farms ran several kilns side by side.
The High Weald was hop country in the way it was also timber country and pasture country: because the ground and the trade allowed it. Hops needed labour at harvest, and the harvest brought people out from London for the picking, which is a social history all of its own and not ours to tell. What matters to the buildings is that when the hop acreage fell away, the oasts stopped earning. A building that cannot pay for its roof usually loses it.
Many were demolished. Many more were converted, which is why so much of Kent and Sussex now sleeps in round rooms. Conversion is not a soft option: a kiln is a cylinder with no straight run of wall, deep sills, and a floor plan that resists every piece of furniture designed since 1960. What you gain is a room with a shape no architect would have drawn for you, and a set of walls thick enough to be quiet.
The Oast at Martins Farm is one of these — a converted single-kiln oast standing in the old yard of a fifteen-acre estate above Frant, established 1830. It sleeps four across two bedrooms, has an AGA in the kitchen and a boot room, and the round kiln room gives the sitting space its curve. The cowl above it still turns with the wind, which makes it the only part of the building that never changed job.
That is the honest appeal of an oast, we think. It is not a cottage pretending to be picturesque. It is a piece of agricultural machinery that was persuaded, without much argument, to hold a family instead.
What the building is, structurally, is a chimney with a floor in it.