Ruined farmhouse

Houses are sort of like the low hanging fruit of the urbex world, in that they require little effort but they are ridiculously numerous and easy to spin into a good clickbaity myth. I may have neglected the local house scene lately in favour of my overseas adventures, which means I have a lot of being a bad example to catch up on here in my local (ish) area. 

A little while ago I swung by this ruined farm house, which is allegedly one of the oldest in its immediate area, counting a few hamlets, villages and whatnot. It hasn't been lived in for quite some time, as is evidenced by the fact that there's not much left inside and it's falling to pieces. It's little more than a shell now, but that's fine. It doesn't need yoinkables to appeal to me. It just needs a good story, and just enough danger to make it interesting but not enough to actually kill me. This place has that.

 

The downside is that the main backbone of my research is census data. Its great for finding out who lived where and when, and what they did for a living, but it lacks any actual humanity. I think humans are more than their jobs. The most interesting people have passions and hobbies, and things to bring to an actual conversation. Unfortunately I can't really discern that from census data, but it's still possible to breathe some life into this shell. 

The house is currently owned by the water company, Severn Trent, who allegedly raised the rent to drive out the last family living here, and have since refused to sell it. Allegedly they have a plan for it. Is it for the house to eventually crumble into nothing? Great plan, Severn Trent!

From a little bit further back, we can see that it was actually divided into two houses with two very different styles. Each half is designed to be a separate house, complete with its own upstairs area, but they're still connected internally, which is a bit peculiar. I assume they were built as one, and the door between them was blocked off at some point. 

The 2009 Streetview shows it empty, but not yet deteriorated to its present condition.

(Image credit: Google Streetview)

But thanks to the internet, we can rewind much further than that, back to 1884.

(Image not mine, obviously)

 

I guess all those cows have since been eaten. 

There's smoke coming from the chimney, and I absolutely love that I can look at this picture from 1884 and accurately guess who is in there at the precise moment it was snapped.

 

The first occupants were the Gill family, headed by a widow, Frances. I'm not entirely sure when her husband died, or whether he lived here with her at all. He married Frances in 1808. 

By 1851, Frances was living here with her unmarried adult children, Thomas and Sarah in their late thirties, and their entourage of servants. The census data is difficult to read, because it's all written in cursive and makes my eyes bleed. No wonder boomers on Facebook can barely spell anything! When they were in school, English was just a trail left by a spider with diarrhea! 

The most legible parts of the 1851 census are the servants and their duties, and the fact that three of them are housekeepers really paints a picture that the Gills were pretty wealthy. They have a young farm labourer named William, and a fifteen year old girl called Jane Jones being one of the housekeepers. Rounding up the housekeeper staff are Gwen and Anne in their thirties. So seven people lived here in total. I do wonder if the house having two distinct upstairs areas has something to do with the servants quarters. That would make sense.

The 1861 census shows that Thomas and Sarah still live here, in their late forties. It mentions that their farm is about two hundred acres and has five employees, but Gwen is the only name that's remained since the 1851 census. The others are all new servants. The most curious one is a Rowland Edwards, a farm labourer who is 72. It seems a bit unusual to hire a man of that age to be a farm labourer, but hey-ho. Maybe he was super healthy.

By all accounts, Sarah and Thomas Gill were pretty good people. When their local church was renovated in 1864, Thomas donated a flagon to hold water and plate to hold bread. Sarah donated an altar linen. 

Still, it's curious that the Gills never married and went their own way. They were sibling housemates their entire lives, and seemingly had no children. 

By 1871 they had moved away to Llanfechain in Wales. There Thomas Gill is listed as a landowner and "Justice of the Peace," which is some kind of magistrate. He's not Welsh Batman. Although that would make Gwen his Alfred.

 

 

There's quite a few barns outside the house but none of then are accessible. But it hardly matters. We all know what barns look like. 

 

 

This barn can be seen in the background of an old photo. 

 

(Image not mine, obviously)

 

I have no idea who these people are, but that hat hasn't done any favours for the person crouching behind the child, who just looks rather sinister in what was probably intended to be a wholesome family photo. Oh dear.

 

Time to slip inside the house...

It's a rather splendid mixture of decay and wholesomeness, isn't it? There's very little vandalism here, and through the decay its still possible to envision this as a family home. 

 

After the Gill family had moved out, the Jones family moved in. It was interestingly the same family structure, with a family of adults headed by a lone female matriarch, Jane Jones. Unfortunately it's not the same Jane Jones who had once been the young teenage housekeeper here. That would be a neat twist. But no, they are different people. 

 

Jane Jones lived here as of 1871, without her husband even though he wouldn't die until 1899. But keeping her company were her two sons, Simon and Edmund, who were 28 and 31. As with the Gills, they have a small collection of servants living with them, waggoners, housekeepers, labourers, and whatnot. The Jones family actually had a male housekeeper, Edward, who was fourteen. It does seem to eschew traditional gender roles of the time and I wonder if his age had anything to do with that. 

I'm not entirely sure why Jane was living separately from her husband. This is, unfortunately, the sort of depth and nuance that cannot be found by looking at census data. Whatever the story, Jane had another child, Mary, who still lived with her father, and by 1881, Jane had moved back to be with them, leaving Simon and Edmund to run this farm by themselves.

 

The 1871 census does say that this farm consists of 200 acres while the 1881 census gives lists just 150, which is indicative that Simon and Edmund had to sell some land to make ends meet. Did they meet a financial hiccup perhaps?

There is a Mary living with them in 1881, but she's not their sister. Rather she is Simon's wife, although the 1881 census gets this wrong and lists her as Edmund' s wife instead. Whoops.

They have a handful of staff, including shepherds and farm labourers.

By 1891, Edmund had moved out and married a woman named Margaret, leaving the house to Simon and his wife Mary. They did as married couples do, and shot their DNA into each other and added young Thomas to the household. Thomas would continue to live here, taking up the farming trade. Simon seemingly moved out when Thomas got married in 1918. Alas, Thomas passed away in this house in 1922, and Simon himself would follow in 1923 at the ripe old age of eighty. Thomas was awfully young, only 38. I've not found any records of him having children.

 

The front room has this wonderful huge fireplace flanked by the remnants of pretty wallpaper. It's probably the feature that adds the most character to the entire house. When I look at this room, I can totally envision the Gill family, the Jones family, or any of the houses successive residents chilling out in here, smoking a pipe, reading a newspaper, setting up their very first TV, and just relaxing. It feels homely here, despite the decay. 

 

The fireplace is huge though. Think how many home invaders you could cook in that. 

 

 

I'm not entirely sure when the house was split into two. Presumably it was in the early 20th Century, because that's when we start to see some overlap with the inhabitants. Firstly, a chap called John moved here from Warwickshire with his wife Ester and their horde of children, Edward, Ruby, Ida, Harry and Trevor. His obituary mentions that they moved here in 1909, so the Jones family would have been their neighbours.

John was quick to find employment at the local hotel where he remained until his retirement in 1947. He lived to the mighty age of 92, and there are plenty of photos of him online.

 

(Photo of John not mine, obviously)

And now that we're moving beyond the clinical and emotionless world of census data, talking about people within living memory, it's possible to tell a little bit more about John. He was apparently a lovely gentleman and very fond of horses. In fact he soon became the head coachman at the hotel where he worked. His wife, Ester, was also described as a lovely lady, and I've found photos of her too!

 

(Photo of Ester not mine, obviously)

 

And these photos are allegedly taken outside this very house, which is cool. And even though they already had a ginormous horde of children when they moved in, John and Ester clearly thought this was a brilliant location to raise more, because they had an additional five, Gwen, Samuel, Joan, Mary and Vyrnwy. They must have been knackered.

Mary and Vyrnwy were twins, but rather unfortunately little Vyrnwy died of pneumonia when he was just two months old in 1912. There is a photo of Ester holding a baby in 1912, and since it's dated October, after little Vyrnwys passing, it can be assumed that this is Mary.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

 By 1939, John and Ester were living here with Harry, Trevor, Samuel, and Joan. Their children are all adults at this point, with Harrys occupation listed as a shepherd, Trevor as a forestry labourer, Samuel as a farm labourer, and Joan joining her mother with household duties.

 

I'm not sure what became of the other children. Gwen is a bit of a black hole of information, and her entire existence is actually word of mouth, but Ida had married a mechanic called Norman in 1930, so moved out to start a family of her own at a place called Eagles Nest. I think they ended up owning a local shop. Edward similarly got married in 1933, and Mary did have children although I haven't got dates of birth for them. In fact, as soon as I realised they were still alive I stopped my digging. I'm a renegade historian, not a stalker. 

I'm not entirely sure what Ruby was doing during this time, but I did hear that she later moved "next door," which is essentially the same house.

 

 

I guess this was the pantry.

At some point there must have been a fire. It's taken a good chunk out of the roof, and the elements have subsequently got in, making everything a rather delicious death trap. Let's do the last thing anyone should do in a fire-damaged building, and go upstairs.

 

The old landing rail is lying on the floor next to the stairs.

 

 

The upstairs is as you'd expect. It's burnt out, empty, and I'd trust the floorboards to support my weight about as much as I'd trust the McCanns to babysit.  

There is a video on the internet from about four years ago that shows these upper rooms, still derelict, but also less fire-fucked, with lovely wallpaper to give it all character, and plants reaching in through the ceiling to give it that jumanji vibe along with a looming sense of temporarity. It's a bit hard to watch because it just plays cheesy sad music throughout, but it makes for a refreshing change of pace in the urbex world in that we actually see the building in question, and not just half an hour of some guy talking about how they just got chased by an alligator or something. Someone on Youtube actually gets that urbex is about the building, and not about getting your weird head on camera, and I appreciate that.

So according to that video, there were at least four bedrooms up here at one point. It's not really very obvious now.

 

This is the only bedroom that's survived, in stark contrast to the others. There's still ash in the fireplace, too, giving it that slight glimpse back to the last occupants final years here. If only I'd had my wide angle lens back then, to really get these bedrooms in view. 

There's also a small bathroom.

So while we can surmise that Bill, Ester and their entourage were living here in the early 20th Century, my sources indicate that a Mr Bull also lived in one of the houses in 1939 with his wife Lilian, and their son who was born in 1936.

The 1911 census says that Mr Bull grew up in Ireland with his parents and brother. His father, who was known as Old Man Bull, was a gamekeeper to the Irish Nationalist politician Edward King-Harman, who passed away in 1888.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

The above photo shows Old Man Bull and his family in Ireland. Our Mr Bull is the little boy on the right. His brother on the far left would travel to America, while his sister standing on the chair would go to live in Liverpool. 

 While just the one Bull is said to have lived in this particular house, it seems that Old Man Bull moved to this area too, likely after his employer passed away. There are pictures of him with his Labrador, Patch, chilling on a nearby hill.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

Old Man Bull passed away in 1942, but our Mr Bull, the occupant of half of this house, became very prominent to the locality as a gamekeeper. In 1940 he organised the Home Guard Dance at the local village hall, and he also had his sister Connie and niece Sylvia come to stay during the war, when they were evacuated from Liverpool. 

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

There are three generations of Bull in this photo. Old Man Bull, is wife, his daughter, and little Sylvia down from Liverpool to escape the Luftwaffe. All of them have probably set foot in this house. 

 

 Back down stairs, the kitchen is surprisingly pristine.

 

 

Relatively speaking, anyway. It's still fucked, but if you were going to use this house for shelter during a rainstorm, this is the room you'd use.

 

 

There's still some stuff here left behind by the last occupant. 

 

 

And there are still wall tiles. 

 

But now onto the best part of any abandoned building, the toilet.

 

It's still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs!

 

 

Right in the middle, we have this room. This, I think, is where the two houses connected. The other half of the house is on an incline, meaning that going up these stairs takes us to the ground floor of the house next door. At some point in the early 20th Century, the two halves were separated to make two separate homes.

 

Let's head upstairs.  

 

 

Here's the front door of the other half of the house. They had a cat!  

As we can see, someone has been in here and ripped out the copper piping from the floor.

 

One inconsistency in the houses timeline comes with the Carpenter family. Walter Carpenter was born in 1897, and his wife Alice was born in 1909. They were married in 1927 at the local church and seem to have been local to this area for their entire lives. Allegedly they lived here at one point, but I cannot find any census data to support that, and it bugs me somewhat. What I do know is that John and Ester knew the Carpenters, and that they got along.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

The image shows Alice Carpenter and her daughter Beryl, holding her grandson Baby John. I'm not sure when it was taken, but Baby John was born in 1957 so presumably it was around then.

I'm not sure how the Carpenters fit into all this, but since John and Ester knew them, then if they did live at this house then it was likely shortly after Mr Bull left in the later 20th Century. They were definitely living elsewhere in 1939. 

 

And I must digress slightly because the Carpenters have a rather interesting story concerning Walters brother, William, nicknamed Harry Bach, which is Welsh for Little Harry. Harry Bach was born in 1879, and while he was the eldest Carpenter child and raised alongside his siblings as one of them, he found out when he got married that he had actually been adopted. His mother had him out of wedlock, his biological father allegedly dying before they could tie the knot, and so the Carpenters took him in, as was tradition at the time. Single Mothers were a cultural no-no and it would remain that way well into the 20th Century.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

So that's him on the left there, kneeling. He was a gamekeeper for the local hotel, so likely knew the coachman John.

There's a story attached to Harry Bach that I quite like. One day in 1901 a rich toff bet him fifty guineas that he couldn't catch a specific amount of fish on the nearby lake. Harry Bach said that he didn't have that much money to bet, so the toff offered to just give it to him if he could catch that many fish. Harry Bach did so, and won the fifty guineas. The following day, the toff returned and said that now that Harry Bach had the fifty guineas to bet, he bet him once again that he couldn't catch a specific number of fish. Once again, Harry Bach won and now had one hundred guineas. He decided to use the money to elope with the love of his life. Their daughter Ethel was born later that year.

That's such a lovely story.

 

There's more of the same in this side of the house, really. The ground floor fireplace isn't quite as impressive as the one "next door" but it still has character. It still gives a homely vibe to the room.

 

 

A few other names have been associated with the house too, but it's very difficult to find any verifying information. Among them are Nesta and Elfyn, who were apparently shepherds, which indicates that they probably lived here as employees to the home owners. But once again, I can't find any documents to verify them.

Also, I didn't realise until I researched this placejust how much a Christian upbringing has ruined the mental image of shepherds for me, along with anal sex, because I always picture them as the bible does, with flowy robes and long grey beards. In fact everyone in the bible just looks like a less-happy Jesus. They were there at the nativity, only the most well known bible story of all time, all beardy and robe-flowy, and that's just what springs to mind when I picture shepherds now.

I seriously doubt any 20th Century shepherds wore long flowy robes. I kinda feel like the look is a bit of a trip hazard.

But I digress.

 

There's another room with a fireplace, somehow feeling much more ominous. It feels like it's going to collapse if I so much as sneeze.

 

 

Both Mr Bull and Johns family were living at the houses on the 3rd July 1953 when there was a storm so severe that the entire area flooded. Local papers at the time tell of how some farm workers were only able to survive by clambering onto a bulldozer. John and Ester, it's said, were marooned at the farm until the flood water subsided. 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 And here's a photo from the time, albeit probably a day or two after the storm. Given the 1950s photo quality I'm unable to actually identify any of the humans in the image, but it's still cool to see this house over half a century ago, sealed off from the world by flood water. 

I'm not sure when the Bulls left, but following John's death in 1969, both of houses seem to have been occupied by his quantiful offspring. I'm not entirely sure who was the big cheese of the household, or the "head" as the census data likes to say, purely because I haven't delved too deeply at this point. These are people who are in living memory of their descendants. Their individual deaths range from 1986 to 2000. That's too raw for me. I'm a historian, not a stalker. Let the family have their secrets.

 

 

Although apparently one of Johns offspring decorated the house with taxidermy fox heads, which is pretty interesting.

 

Here's a letter from the energy supplier, dated 2011. 

Moving on upstairs...

 

So this is the second upstairs bit. I assume, prior to the split, that such a design was because of the servants quarters, but I might be wrong.

 

 

Really it's just a load of tiny bedrooms that make me wish I'd had my wide angle lens. 

 

 

Here we have what's probably the master bedroom. 

 

 

So as we wrap up, thanks to me future urban explorers and youtubers know what names they need to claim have inexplicably come through on their ouija boards, or whatever. And yet I won't get a cut of their ad revenue. For shame. But given that history only ever talks about the rich and the famous, I'm quite glad I could shine a spotlight on the average joes of the Victorian era and early 20th Century.

The local area does actually have a few ghost stories. In particular, the road near this house is said to be haunted by "Yspryd y Gro," who allegedly throws mud and dirt at people who pass by. Intriguingly it's name translates to "Spirit of the Cave," which means there might be one around here that could make a good future mooch. 

One final stop remains, and that's the toilet.

 

If it isn't obvious, this is how I got in! It's certainly not the most flattering means of entry. 

 

But that's about it for this place. The house is a ruin, and visually it's very unappealing. But when we can put names and faces to a house, even one as fucked as this one, it brings it to life. We can imagine this once being a family home. This all mattered to someone once, and did so for about two hundred years, and it's sad to see it like this now. With a bit of love, this could become a family home once again, but it seems that's unlikely to happen.

My next couple of blogs will be houses in my local area, one of which is known in urbex circles, and given an illustrious nickname that is the pinnacle of imagination, exemplifying the finest minds of our generation. They call it... Fireplace Cottage! Wow! 

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