(External photo from Streetview because I forgot to take one, soz)
Around the time of this adventure, my camera stopped focusing like it used to, slowly succumbing to years of being dragged around Europe, to shipwrecks and Nazi bunkers. It was only a matter of time before it packed up completely, probably at the worst possible time. My pictures of this house are a bit poop. But my photo book, "Rooftops of Shrewsbury" has some less poopy images, and you can order it here if you're interested.
Today I'm checking out this abandoned house. I know in the past I've been quite dismissive of abandoned houses, but I think that's because I associated them with the types of urbexers who just want youtube clicks and will do anything to get them. After a while it gets a bit disheartening, constantly seeing some twats social media stickers in a dead grandmas bedroom. This was someone's home.
But in recent months I've gained a newfound appreciation for these lost places. I've actually become quite fascinated by searching historic records and telling the stories of ordinary people who have passed on. Usually it's only really the rich and famous who get remembered and I like to put the spotlight on the common every day civilian, and tell their story as best as I can with the information I've got.
I actually consider it a pretty big responsibility to tell the truth to the best of my ability, because these people aren't here to tell their story or defend their name against some online "influencer" who will say whatever gets them clicks.
Here we have the titular meat that has given the house its name among the urbex circles. For some reason, someone has strung rotting meat around the house, and it made for some very interesting "near misses" as I navigated the hallways in the dark. But generally, other than an abundance of flies and the occasional foul whiff floating my way, it didn't bother me too much.
There are some bells hanging up in the hallway, which indicate that at one point the house had servants.
The popular history regurgitated by urbexers about this place (when they can be bothered) is that a family of three lived here and farmed the land. The elderly couple, Arthur and Gwyneth Hyde, passed away "within weeks" (four months, actually) of each other. Their son, also getting on a bit, allegedly grieved so heavily that he was unable to enter the house again. He lived in a caravan on the land, but due to his failing health he was unable to farm efficiently and had a few media controversies about the wellbeing of his animals, in that they were living in abhorrent conditions and had no access to water. One article even had a photograph of a dead lamb just to pull on the heartstrings.
He was fined and forbidden to keep livestock. He also ended up being unable to live in his caravan and chose instead to live in a car on the property, which indicates that his health problems may be mental more so than physical, and this has led to some youtube urbexers acting like he's some kind of boogeyman-style psychopath lurking behind a tree ready to pounce out with a chainsaw.
And people wonder why men don't talk about their mental health.
In actual fact, people who actually spoke to him said that he was lovely, but not well.
And now he too has gone. It seems like he quite obviously needed support to reach a dignified quality of life, and like so many he fell through the cracks in the system.
I will come back to the Hyde's because obviously they were the final occupants of the house, and they seem to have lived here longer than anyone else. But I've been able to track this house back 180 years, and I totally need to talk about that too!
This is definitely one of the more interesting rooms in the house. It's clearly been rummaged through and mildly looted, but it's still so well preserved, offering an insight into the Hyde's life. On the wall are photos of their wedding in 1949.
The first record of this house that I've been able to find is from 1844, when a "Mrs Powell" sold all the livestock and farming equipment because she was giving up on the farming business.
I have no idea how long she was farming here for, or what prompted her to give it up, or even what her first name was. But since her title is "Mrs" and she's making some pretty hefty decisions for a woman in 1844, I do wonder if maybe she was widowed.
By 1854, a man named Charles Walker was living here but he evidently didn't stay here for long because in 1856, a man named Samuel Nicholls was the occupant, with his wife Patience.
Samuel had been born in 1805 and had moved here from Yorkshire, marrying Patience in 1840. Prior to farming, Samuel had been a gardener. In 1956 he did put adverts out for lodgers here, which seems pretty logical from a financial standpoint. The house actually has five bedrooms, and it would have been foolish to waste them. The advert for the lodger offered the perks of being able to shoot and go fishing on the land, so I do wonder if Samuel was looking for a friend as well as a tennant. It seems that two brothers started lodging here, Henry and John Armisted. There were also a couple of teenage farm servants, Robert Hill and Mary Blakeway.
Poor Mary was just a teenage dairy maid when she lived here in the 1860s, but records show that she was blind in her fifties, and living in the care of her sister.
Samuel died in 1872, whereupon the farm became vacant.
There's still sheet music on the piano.
A lot of the trinkets are labelled with various locations, which indicates that the Hyde's liked to go places and raid the gift shop. There's an elephant from Bristol Zoo and something from Tintern Abbey. There's also plenty of crested china, which was insanely collectable back in the day. There were hundreds of pieces of otherwise identical crockery and ornaments that bore the crest of the specific town where they could be purchased, encouraging traveling as well as collecting. I actually did an overly extensive blog on one of the first factories to make these, the Goss Works, with their remarkably dysfunctional family at the heart of their pottery empire.
There are numerous photos dotted around, depicting the Hyde family in their glory days. It's sad to look at these and see how the family home has ended up. The baby, quite possibly, is the chap who ended up living in his car outside.
Onto the kitchen...
The calendar on the wall is dated January 1998.
After Samuel Nicholls, the next significant occupant was a chap named Edward Lane. He was born in 1838 near Church Stretton and had a job as a teenager working as a servant. He married a tailors daughter, Sarah Rogers, when they were both nineteen, and he ended up getting into agriculture. They were living together in this house as early as 1881, along with Sarah's sister Mary. I'm not entirely sure why Mary was there, but the house has five bedrooms so they might as well fill them!
They also recruited a stable boy in 1882 whose job description just said "help with stables and garden and make yourself generally useful."
Edward was very prominent in his community and in his local church, so much so that if his sheep did so much as bleat it would be mentioned in the newspapers like an achievement of stellar proportions. Then in 1885 they reported on the death of his sister-in-law, Mary.
Nothing much was said about it. The incident had a single paragraph in the local rag, but she was only 62 and she died right here in this house. Her sister, Edwards wife, would follow in March of 1900, similarly passing away in this house.
Youtube "ghost hunter" urbexers haven't made contact with Sarah Lane or Mary Rogers yet. Probably because they don't have Wikipedia pages to read beforehand.
It seems that Edward was overcome by grief to the point that he couldn't live here anymore. Sarah died in March and he was selling all of his livestock and farming equipment that September. But I actually suspect this had been the plan all along since Sarah had began selling livestock in the months leading up to her death. Someone took the opportunity to steal a rake from their garden, and there was a minor police investigation into that, but whether it led anywhere is unknown and pretty irrelevant.
Edward ended up leaving this house and traveling up to Lancashire, where he met his second wife. He married her in 1905 and they moved to Herefordshire, where he died in 1922. The official report said that he was absolutely fine one day, and then died after a sudden 24-hour illness.
There's some more rotting meat hanging from the stair railing. I don't know who did this, but I highly doubt it means anything too sinister. I've seen plenty of occasions where things are staged because it makes for good youtube. Just look at that Teddy Bear House, where an urbexer admitted to staging the teddy bears. Apparently rearranging a dead old woman's house is something to brag about.
Admittedly, I've never seen rotting flesh strung around an abandoned place, but this is definitely deliberate to give the house some sort of morbid hype.
Check this out!
Here we have the old school books of Mr Hyde, the poor chap who ended up living out of his car. This is pretty extraordinary. He was born in 1954, so this is some really vintage school work here. Here he's writing about the Spanish Armada.
I love that we can see where his teacher has corrected him. Something so mundane somehow makes it all more real. There's history here. This man grew up in this house. An entire lifetime of memories is preserved.
There's a taxidermy pheasant in a display tank, and a skeletal horses leg on top of it.
I'm starting to suspect that someone found a dead horse on the land and just casually dragged bits of it in here for some reason. That would explain the meat.
It's impossible to know which bedroom belonged to which family member, but this one is delightfully precarious. The floor has completely caved in at one end, making the entire bedroom a deasth slide down to the ground floor.
In 1906 the house was lived in by George Aymes and his wife. George was actually a shopkeeper, and the farm here was kept by his wife, although he would joke that they made more money from lodgers than they did from farming. Their most prominent lodger was Mrs Harriet Edith Holborrow, and her story is pretty sad.
She was born in 1867, and when she was 23 she married a man named Albert. They were pretty well off. They had servants and everything. Albert owned a hotel, and was also a "traveller" for a brewery. That is, he travelled the country meeting with businesses and trying to get them to sell his employers products. It's a largely obsolete job today.
The Holborrows had four children- Edith in 1890, Dorothy in 1896, and the twins Robert and Francis in 1899.But in between popping out babies, Harriet spent about twelve weeks in a lunatic asylum in n 1898.
I don't know why she was institutionalised but it's fairly common knowledge that admission to a lunatic asylum in the Victorian era wasn't particularly difficult. She'd lost her sister Louisa that year, so she could have just been a bit depressed.
The papers described Harriet as "demonstrating the unusual power of her speaking her mind."
Well fuck, better put her in the X-Men!
What is this, the Republic of Gilead? Pendle in 1612? Modern day America?
Maybe she was just in a lunatic asylum for having boundaries. That happened too.
But also potentially relevant is that a common cause for asylum admission was "Hysteria," an illness initially believed to be experienced entirely by women. It was only really linked to trauma when the symptoms of hysteria were seen in men after the first world war. This actually paved the way to society acknowledging domestic abuse, but for countless years, the signs of trauma from rape and abuse were just written off as this illness.
And while it is wrong to make assumptions about the Holborrow family, their story does make me suspicious.
Albert and Harriet would have a messy divorce, and the story was covered by the media at the time, albeit largely from Alberts perspective.
They allegedly had a happy fifteen years of marriage, until 1905 when Harriet began to "neglect her home duties" and took a liking to a man named Mr Morgan. But she didn't have an affair or anything, at least not to my knowledge, or to Albert's knowledge. The behaviour that Albert found suspicious was just that she was always happy to see Mr Morgan, and would rush over to him if she spotted him. Mr Morgan was also married, and during the court process Albert was actually questioned about the damage his accusations could do to Mr Morgan's reputation. The guy was part of the local council, not just some horny stable boy whose reputation could freely be hurled under the proverbial bus.
But nothing was explicitly said to have happened between the two.
There's still clothes in the wardrobe, and there's a portable toilet next to it. Perhaps this room was used by Gwyneth Hyde towards the end of her life.
An eagle eye might notice that the big envelope on the bed is addressed to "Gwyneth Watkins," addressing her by her maiden name. It's not addressed to this address, so it must be something she held onto for some reason. Perhaps this small, cluttered but sparsely decorated bedroom was just used to store their things. I mean nobody wants their portable toilet to clutter up their bedroom. They'd keep it where they can reach it easily, like next to the door in the room next door.
After being accused of romantically pursuing Mr Morgan, Harriet decided to leave Albert and move in with her brother Robert, taking £500 with her, which in 1905 was the equivalent of £52,600. Albert was pretty pissed.
But it seemed she just wanted some time to cool off from being accused of adultery, and she eventually wrote to him, saying that she was coming home.
But, Albert would later tell the court, he had "made discoveries" in the meantime, and didn't want her back. Such discoveries were allegedly photographs of Mr Morgan among her possessions. He told her that if she returned, he would take her children away, at which point she flipped.
The letter she wrote in response was read out in court:
"You damned scamp, if I ever set eyes on you again I will shoot you as dead as a doornail, even if I have to hang for it. You sly devil, you have not only poisoned my father and mother's minds against me but you tried to take my children away. If I ever set eyes on you again I will shoot you. I will see if you can rob me of my children or not. I not only hate you, I loathe you for your underhanded tricks. If you can take your four children away after this you must be a devil. You never seen to think that one day you will have to appear before your God, which I believe, is money."
Some copies of this letter vary slightly from source to source, some swapping out the mention of her parents for her siblings. Most newspapers adorably censor the word "damned."
At face value it does look dramatic, but in context of her leaving for her brothers house after being accused of adultery, and the fact that her husband has seen her institutionalised before, this looks like the outburst of someone who has been pushed and pushed and pushed.
The courts wouldn't see it that way. They focused on the death threat, the loss of money, and the claim that they had been happily married until the adultery.
Harriet returned home, and Albert apprehensively made her a cup of tea, unsure if she had a gun and was ready to carry out her threat. But they ended up having a pretty calm conversation. She told him that she wanted to end their marriage because she was miserable, and he agreed that they'd write to their solicitor. But when she said that she wanted custody of the children, Albert wouldn't have it, and he sent her, with no money, to live here with George Aymes and his wife. It seems that George and Albert were buddies or something.
Consequently, Harriet was suddenly penniless, and isolated on this big old farm in the middle of nowhere, with two people she didn't know but was suddenly completely dependent on for food and shelter.
Onto the best part of any abandoned building... the bathroom!
Still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.
But then Harriet met a man named Edwin Colebatch while visiting a churchyard. He was there to visit the grave of his dead wife. The two became friends, and it wasn't long before the accusations were made that she was now having an affair with him. This wasn't helped by the fact that she spent the night there. Allegedly she was mainly bonding with his seven children, but the whole situation didn't look favourable for her.
Allegedly Edwin and Harriet were seen going for walks together and going to a pub. Edwin walked her back to this house, only for George Aymes to threaten him with assault, and tell Harriet "As long as you are here, you must behave."
For the record, she was 38.
Upon hearing about this affair, Albert pursued getting a divorce. The court process was well publicised and quite interesting. People on both sides claimed perjury from the other. In a rather unusual progressive moment, George Amyes was accused of perjury, and people did find holes in Alberts story, mainly because he'd never taken action about Harriet's earlier alleged affair with Mr Morgan, and also that his claim that they'd been happily married for fifteen years had a big old plot hole in the form that time he sent her to a lunatic asylum. When asked why she'd gone to stay with her brother, Harriet just said that she wasn't happy, because her husband was always suspicious.
The divorce went ahead, and Edwin Colebatch had to pay Albert Holborrow £25 in damages, which if adjusted by modern standards is around £2,600.
There was a heartbreaking letter written to Edwin Colebatch by Harriet. It read:
"I am very much obliged for you offering to write to the guardians for me, for I really don't know what to do. To be sent here and be kept without any cash is really too bad, besides other things that are not very nice. I did not tell you last evening why I wished you'd accompany me down here, but do you know Mr Aymes actually asked me to go around with him and fasten up the doors at night? I wonder what he takes me for. I am really afraid of him and will take care I am not out by myself when he is about for the little time I remain here, which won't be longer than I can possibly help, for I dislike him very much. If I go back to live in Hereford I shall have friends I can consult, and shall be able to see my solicitor. And if he does not do something, I had better put the matter in other hands, as it is impossible to go on like this any longer.
I am almost wild when I think of the treatment I am receiving. Thanking you for the trouble you are taking for me and with kind regards to yourself and your girls, yours sincerely, Harriet."
This doesn't read like a love letter. It sounds to me like the poor woman was really lonely. She'd been lonely in her marriage, and she'd been sent to a farm in the middle of nowhere, forbidden to see her young children, and treated like property rather than a human being. And when she did make a friend, steps were taken to stop her.
What really bugs me is that she died in 1906, shortly after the divorce went ahead. I can't find the cause of death, but I can't help but feel like I've stumbled onto something sinister here. When a woman writes to a friend that she doesn't feel safe and then ends up dead, that's usually a red flag.
Does it really matter if she was seeing Edwin Colebatch in a romantic way? She and her husband had already had the talk. Both wanted the divorce. Their marriage existed in writing only. Financially smiting Edwin Colebatch is more about control than anything else. It just makes me sad to think about how lonely and isolated she was in this house, living with a couple who treated her like a naughty child and made her feel unsafe.
The house was vacant in 1911. I guess George Aymes and his wife decided not to stay here after being embroiled in some very public marital drama. The Tudge's were the next family to live here, and while I can't find any records about them from earlier than 1939, an article from 1945 said that they had been farming here for 29 years, which gives us the year 1916.
William Tudge was born in 1872 and farmed here with his wife Elizabeth. He was also involved with his local school and had been a member of Ludlow's rural district council.
By 1939, William retired from farming and some of his rooms were put up to let. It seems that the Hyde's moved in and began farming while the house was still owned and occupied by the Tudge's.
Gwyneth was actually here first, before Arthur Hyde. There was also a man named James Bishop who had lived and helped on the farm since 1916. He fell from a ladder while picking pears in 1945, and died in hospital.
Arthur Hyde was born in 1917 to a baker in Hereford, and along with his older sister, he initially followed his father into baking. But somehow he made the leap from baking to farming, and moved in with the Tudge's and Gwyneth, commencing farming at this house as of 1946.
Elizabeth Tudge would also pass away in 1946, and Arthur attended her funeral.
Arthur Hyde popped up in the news in 1948 when a number of his sheep had been found in traps intended for rabbits. One of his lambs had to be put down as a result of having its back legs injured. A fourteen year old boy was fined for it.
Arthur then married Gwyneth in 1949, and they had their son in 1954, and recruited a live-in dairy maid, specifying that they wanted one who was middle aged. I think perhaps it isn't a coincidence that they recruited someone just as their baby was born. It can't be easy running a farm with a newborn. William Tudge passed away in 1954, shortly after their son was born, leaving the Hydes now the big cheeses of the farm.
They were arguably the most successful farmers to live here, winning numerous farming competitions throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and hosting "farm walks" where other farmers could come and tour his farm, with free refreshments. They also featured in a BBC Farming program in 1958.
Arthur did have his mugshot printed in the papers too... but it really wasn't the printing presses finest work:
(Photo not mine- obviously!)
So there we have it. The only picture I can find of Arthur Hyde, and he looks like he's showing up on my doorstep to tell me that I didn't see a flying saucer.
Gwyneth was a bit more prominent in the local rags, frequently writing in to express her opinions on things like sewage pipelines, and then Tony Blairs government and the whole fox hunting thing.
Gwyneth wrote:
"It's a pleasure to have hunting in the countryside. We work in the country and are entitled to have something. They have their pleasure holidays. Leave us country people alone and don't come to live in the country. Stay in the towns."
And, my own views aside, I kinda like the fact that she just flat-out admits that she enjoys fox hunting. When ethics and morality are involved, and someone is in a situation where they might look cruel or vindictive, you'll often see them fumble for some weak justification. We see this all the time where bigots justify their bigotry by saying that it's what their lame God wants. We see it when anti-abortion folks force women to carry their rapists babies to term because it's what God wants, even though the bible actually supports abortion (because they never actually read the damn thing).
So I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's refreshing when someone can just say "I enjoy this, and that's that," even if I don't necessarily agree with them.
There are a few photos here, one being a young girl. This could well by Gwyneth Hyde.
The farm began its sad downfall at the latter end of the 20th Century, when Arthur and Gwyneth's health started to fail. Heralding the downfall, their son was involved in a pretty bad crash when his tractor hit a car in 1995, trapping the other driver for half an hour. Both survived, but were treated for shock. Whether this factored into the Mr Hyde's later mental health issues, I don't know.
Arthur died in hospital in June 2002, and Gwyneth followed in October. Their son was left as the sole occupant, and he just couldn't handle it.
Animal welfare officers were allegedly called out to the farm in 2016, and they found a few dead sheep as well as calves and pigs living in unsuitable living conditions with no access to water. He pleaded guilty to neglect of his animals, and was charged with four animal welfare offences.
Although I'm sure vegans would argue that breeding an animal just to eat it isn't exactly considering their welfare, but isn't this blog riddled with enough boomer rage bait now?
So this farm house was abandoned, although the fields and barns are all still used by another farmer now. Mr Hyde initially lived in a caravan and then a car, before disappearing entirely. He wasn't allowed to keep livestock, and from the sound of it, he should have had help looking after himself too.
It's a shame to see it like this, especially given that the farm used to be so proud, with Arthur Hyde winning so many competitions for his livestock and crops.
This appears to be the master bedroom, but most of them have double beds, so who can tell for sure? This one just has the fanciest bed.
Gwyneth's clothes still hang on the wardrobe.
There's another piano in this bedroom.
And a bed buried under a pile of clutter with a creepy hanging portrait.
This is interesting. It's a funeral program for "Sybil Mary Hyde." Evidently the Hyde's were in touch with their cousins. Sybil isn't exactly a close relation though.
Arthur's father Robert was born in 1875, and Roberts mother Martha was born in 1840. She had Robert when she was 35. He was her only child, and it was out of wedlock, to an unknown father. So really it's quite surprising that she was able to keep Robert at all. Even in the 1960s, if a woman had a child out of wedlock, it would often be put up for adoption, but it was often preferred that the baby was adopted within the family. The most famous example I can think of regarding this is Eric Clapton who was adopted by his own grandmother and was raised believing his mother was his older sister.
Perhaps Robert was adopted within the Hyde family by one of Martha's siblings. That actually would make sense, because while Martha is Arthurs grandmother, Martha's brother John is Sybils grandfather. If Robert had been adopted by John, then Arthur and Sybil would have seen each other as cousins, instead of second cousins. It does make sense.
What doesn't make sense is that she died in 2013, and her funeral program is here in the house, and urbexers have claimed that the surviving Hyde has been unable to set foot in here after his parents died in 2002. Evidently he did come back in here, and evidently he did stay in touch with the wider Hyde family.
But then that also raises the question of why he chose to leave it untouched and live out of his car.
Obviously, it's the Hyde's stuff that decorates the place now, and it's impossible to know who slept in each bed. The house has five bedrooms and also had live-in employees.
But even before the Hyde family, there's some real history here. One of these rooms is where Harriet Holborrow no doubt spent many a night sobbing at her predicament half a century before the Hyde's even moved in, and two of these rooms are where Sarah Lane and her sister passed away a few years before that. These rooms have seen so many memories and emotions, both positive and negative.
Heading back downstairs...
The final rooms to check out are at the back downstairs, behind the kitchen. They seem to have been used as workshops and utility rooms.
There's a chainsaw here. How ominous.
There's an old clothes mangle here, which is how people got the creases out of fabric back in the day.
What's really cool, in a sad kinda way, is that over by the back door is a whole heap of farming prizes. But the earliest one is dated 1896, so they must have belonged to William Tudge, and he must have earned them prior to living here.
Given that the Hyde's kept them, and given that Arthur Hyde would also earn prizes throughout the 1950s, it kinda paints a picture, not only of Arthur's respect for William Tudge, but also of a whole mentor/mentee dynamic.
And that's all I've got. The "Meat Farm," so called because someone decided to hang bits of a dead horse around it, is riddled with sadness across multiple generations and numerous families. The legacy of the Hyde family met its sad end, with a man who clearly needed help failed by the system. Prior to that we saw the sad case of Harriet Holborrow, whose time here was brief and miserable, failed by the system.
Of note, Harriet's children did grow up not really knowing their mother. Dorothy went on to become a nurse, and went to Canada when she retired, dying in 1990. Francis fought in the first world war, before moving to Canada and becoming a reverend and starting a family. His twin brother Robert also fought in the first world war, and then moved to Liverpool. He died in 1982. Harriets eldest daughter Edith died when she was just eighteen, which is a real shame because she was fifteen when Harriet died.
Her father Albert was quick to remarry and have other children, while raising his original ones. Edith was in a perfect position to tell her younger siblings about their real mother, but she never had the chance.
It is important to remember that while the sad parts of history are the most frequently reported, they are also spread out. Harriet's ordeal was in 1905, the Tudge's died in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Hyde's died in 2002.
In between all that, there were still years of happy memories.
Abandoned houses are eerie and sad, but they are also worthy of the highest respect, because they are essentially memorials to people who have passed away.
Alas, they seldom get the respect that they deserve.
But I enjoyed this place, and it was a privilege to talk about the people who used to live here.
If you like my blogs and want to see more then please follow my social media. Facebook has recently told me again that it's expanded my reach for being a good boy, and just like before I have yet to see a difference. I'm on Twitter too for some reason, and I'm on Instagram, where none of my followers ever see anything I post. So because the mainstream social media platforms are just colossal data-mining operations littered with rage-bait, you can follow me on the less-miserable ones, Bluesky, Vero and Cara. They're small but my hope is they'll grow and my hope is someday we can all go back to the era where we actually saw the posts of the people we chose to follow instead of what the algorithm wants us to see.
Thanks for reading!
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