Spider Farm

Hello everyone!
Any long term reader of "Shrewsbury From Where You Are Not" will know by now that there's a peculiar high number of abandoned houses in Shropshire where the owners just mysteriously fell off the planet. I'd love to make the blog posts more exciting by spewing some tale of coincidentally following the tracks of a serial killer, but the truth is much less exciting. The England/Wales border is actually a hive of time/space anomalies. Understand, once one is actually in Wales, or England if you're heading that way, it's fine. But the more one lingers on the border, the more Bermuda Triangularly things will get. I heard a little while ago that someone tried to walk along the border once and ended up in Narnia. So when crossing, it's best just to run for the border like a bullet and dive across as fast as one can!

Dare I risk a visit for the sake of an abandoned house???

Damn straight I would!!!

This is the Spider Farm!

*Cue dramatic music*

The nickname Hobbit House initially sprung to mind during the explore, after suffering numerous head injuries from the ceiling lights. It was worse for my accomplice, the Tree Surgeon, because he's taller than me. It turned out that some of the ceiling lamps had in fact been dragged down from the ceiling, either by past visitors or by my arch nemesis Gravity, to dangle at a lower height. But that's not to say this place was trashed. In fact, it seemed remarkably immaculate.
The nickname "Hobbit House," was slightly ill fitting though so I decided instead to name the old farm house based on the large arachnid presence.  

As you can see, there were plenty of outbuildings, and with the clouds growing ominous, we decided to slip inside.
Usually I finish with the outbuildings but let's face it, if you've seen one barn, you've pretty much seen them all, so let's get them out of the way quickly. This one was pretty eerie.

The one outbuilding with a fireplace and old lounge furniture was a curiosity, as if it was turned into a living space outside of the actual house.

One final outbuilding was on the verge of collapse, but not exactly mindblowing.

Onto the house...

Remember,  I do NOT disclose locations. I do not force entry, vandalize, or steal.
Trespass without forced entry is a civil offence rather than a criminal one, which isn't worth acting on unless one causes damage, steals, has ill intent, etc. I simply photograph and leave everything as I find it. 

We entered the house through a low, smashed window, and found ourselves in a cold, damp room somewhat slightly beneath the ground, lower than the rest of it. It was like a pseudo cellar, and was probably used for refrigeration purposes back in the days before fridges. The ceiling lamp gave me my first head injury of the day.

As you can see, we were joined in our adventure by numerous spiders, and were happy to see that a bird had once made a nest on top of the electric meter. It was now just as abandoned as the house itself though. Maybe the spiders ate them.

Onto the kitchen... it was spacious. Certainly bigger than the one in my flat. One of the palindromes in Shrewsbury once revealed to me that her mother had lived in the flat I currently live in when she was younger, and that she was responsible for swapping the kitchen with the bedroom, due to the bedroom being diddy. But having said that, if the room that is my bedroom had not been changed into a bedroom from a kitchen, that kitchen would still be smaller than this one!
I guess it had a dining table in the same room.

A butterfly in a spiders web.

There's still cutlery in the drawers. 

Behind the fridge was a mighty spider. The Tree Surgeon was able to identify the gender of the spider, which I found very informative. 

 And here's a hatch that gave us a view of the lounge, which was similar in its cleanliness. Sure, there were spider webs and whatnot, but nobody had come and trashed it. I felt less like a miscreant adventurer and more like I was photographing a property for an estate agent.

Now there's an interesting career path...

It's actually eerie how clean all this is.
There's a little damage here and there, but this place is no Milk Cottage. In fact, nowhere I've ever explored is quite that bad... but even compared to most other abandoned houses, the likes of which are a few good thunderstorms away from rubble, this one really just needs a little TLC and it will be fine to live in.

The building had an unusual stairway design. It was central, and led to an upper floor, each with four smaller stairways leading off to each individual room. I fell in love. If this wasn't so remote, I would live here. I don't care about Spiderzilla behind the fridge. We'd become best of friends!

This window is on the landing, overlooking the outbuildings. Do you see how low the ceiling is? It was here that I received my second bump to the head, albeit a softer one, from this red lampshade.

There was a fairly average bathroom. A few wall tiles had been ripped out, and the sink was in bits.

The bedrooms still had loads of furniture in.

Mattresses aren't exactly cheap. In fact none of the furniture left over is. But the garage was the real shocker.

Loads of discarded furniture easily restorable and fit for use. But on the floor was a stained glass window, still in good condition and again, easily restorable.
Why does an abandoned farm house even have a stained glass window?

The newspaper was dated 1987 but just when I thought that I could use that to estimate the time this place was abandoned, I found another publication, this one from 1939!

Now there's no way this place was abandoned in 1939, but the building itself clearly has a long history, as established by the pseudo cellar. And if this was a family that retains relics such as this, then the 1987 newspaper is not an accurate indicator of the time of abandonment either. So this place is a complete mystery!

It's no Mary Celeste like Vanity House, and it's not trashed or pillaged. The things that are just left are odd things to just leave, right down to the cutlery, and it's obviously not being maintained or else Spiderzilla and all his brides wouldn't be dining on butterfly.

But people have been here before us, as evidenced by the smashed windows that gave us access.

I guess it remains a mystery. If you have any information about this place or any other location mentioned on this website, please get in touch. I can be reached on various social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Next blog will be a quick dash out of Shropshire just to make the name of the blog inaccurate... I really should have thought things through when I first made this thing...

But thanks for reading! Stay awesome, all of you.