Barn Cottage

I have a couple of small blogs that I want to power through before I write about some big industrial bonanza on my travel blog, where I've just done a spaceship. As far as urbex goes, Shropshire is an over-grazed pasture, but it still has a few small hidden gems that might fly under the radar of the "Nobody will like me unless I use clickbait" type of urbexers. And if there's even a shred of a story to be told, then I will sink my teeth into it.

And that brings us to Barn Cottage. 

It's an adorable little ruin sitting in a field in the Shropshire countryside. It's fenced off, for the safety of the public, and also has a couple of signs warning people not to enter. But, spoiler alert, that's exactly what I did. 

Afterwards, I ended up speaking to an elderly man who told me that he used to play in it as a child, and it was abandoned even then. He said that back then it was possible to get upstairs. 

Today there is no upstairs, but I absolutely love these tales of vintage pre-internet urbex. I think it's fascinating that people have always been drawn to that sort of thing. I've found stories of people exploring abandoned places as far back as the 1700s. The internet has drawn attention to urbex, but it has always existed. 

Can Barn Cottage really be considered urbex today? It's not urban and it's barely exploring. But fuck it, we're going in anyway. 

The first occupants of Barn Cottage, as far as I can tell, were a chap called Lancelot Corfield and his wife Amelia. And I just love this duo already. They sound like they stepped right out of a fairy tale. How can any couple be called Lancelot and Amelia without being the main characters of some epic story?

But interestingly, this isn't the first Lancelot Corfield to exist in Shropshire, nor would he be the last. The Corfield family is pretty huge, and the first Lancelot Corfield popped up in Hughley in 1592, when he was born to 42-year-old Richard Corfield and his nineteen-year-old wife, Elizabeth. 

Lancelot would name one of his own sons Lancelot, and the name just got passed down until the birth of our Lancelot in 1828. He was also born in Hughley to a farmer. His future wife, Amelia, was born a little while later in 1832. As a teenager she worked as a servant for the Pritchard family in Broseley. 

The annoying thing about using records for research is that even though it gives me a huge tidal wave of information, there's very little of the human element. Lancelot and Amelia married in 1855, but I don't know how they met or fell in love. These are the stories I would love to tell, but they don't get passed along by the census records. It's a huge shame. 

Between 1855 and 1867, the two had five children, Sarah, Jane, Amelia, Lancelot Jr and Thomas. It's not all surprising that the firstborn son was named after his father, but it is interesting that they had already two daughters before they decided to name one after Amelia. As a farming family in rural Shropshire, I wasn't expecting to find much on them, but Lancelot does occasionally get mentioned in the papers for growing some damn good parsnips or something. He was also fined in 1875 for being drunk and disorderly with his buddies, so he also had a bit of a wild side. 

The Corfield's had moved into Barn Cottage at some point before 1881, but by then most of their children had grown up, so only the younger two came with them. Lancelot Jr was seventeen and Thomas was thirteen. It seems that having raised their children to adulthood, their move to Barn Cottage was a means of downsizing once their household was quieter. Barn Cottage was just accommodation for farm workers, with tenancy offered in exchange for service. As a result, Lancelot and both of the boys were employees to a larger farm. 

But Lancelot was clearly prominent in the community. Documents would refer to him as "Lancelot Corfield of Barn Cottage." Even the local rags mention of Jane's wedding in 1882 referred to her as "the daughter of Lancelot Corfield of Barn Cottage." Their tenancy of this building was a defining characteristic. 

Lancelot died in 1891, but his wife and two sons continued living here. His daughter Amelia would also move back into the house, presumably to keep her widowed mother company. Thomas Corfield worked as a blacksmith, and Lancelot Jr worked as a waggoner. In 1893, he was involved in some controversy for making a horse with an injured leg pull a waggon roughly eight miles from Barn Cottage into Shrewsbury. When he was challenged about this, he was quick to point the finger at the man who had sold him the horse, who would later claim that the horse had been crippled for four years, and should really be put down. Both men were charged for animal abuse.

Amelia Corfield would die in 1894. In fact, both mother and daughter died, which is very curious. The younger Amelia died in June at the age of 33, and her mother Amelia passed away in October. 

Having lost the head of the household, the Corfield family left Barn Cottage. Thomas got married, and moved to Wednesbury where he continued to be a blacksmith. Lancelot Jr got married and moved back into the house where he'd been born, worked as a garden labourer, and named his own son Lancelot. One of the Lancelot's faced further legal trouble in 1925 for riding a motorcycle dangerously but it's unclear which one this is. 

I quite like that I've been able to find something about them, beyond dates of birth, death and residency, even if none of it is particularly positive. 

The house itself is a ruin but has a few small features that help it cling on to any character it once had. It's strange to think that this was where Amelia Corfield prepared meals for her family.

In 1911 Barn Cottage was occupied by John Humphreys and his wife Elizabeth. Both were born in Wales to farming families in 1872 and 1873. They married in 1896 and had six children between 1898 and 1911. These were Ethel, Another John, Llewellyn, Margaret, Winifred and Maud. When they came to Barn Cottage it was once again under an employment basis, with John working as a shepherd on the farm. 

But it's weird to think of a family of eight living in such a tiny cottage. In many ways this is a great insight into the living conditions of the era. A large family crammed into a tiny space, earning a living off the land, and probably shitting in a privy shed outside. And they didn't know any better. This was normal for them. The living conditions of today would sound like science fiction. 

But apparently Barn Cottage wasn't for them, because they'd all moved out by 1921. John and Elizabeth went on to have even more children, and they all grew up and scattered around Shropshire. The boys predominantly worked in farming while the girls became servants. Most of them died in the 1980s. Their time here was really just a small footnote in their lives. 

All that's left of the upstairs is this fireplace. At one time this was crackling away in John and Elizabeth's bedroom. 

Directly below it is the larger fireplace. It's weird to imagine this blazing away while John sat and ate his dinner. 

In 1921 Barn Cottage was occupied by William Preece and his wife Eliza, the daughter of a road labourer. It seems that these guys had always lived in the area, and married in 1900. They had six children prior to moving into Barn Cottage, but their eldest three, Annie, Agnes and Elsie had all gone by the time they moved in. But that's okay, because they had three more. 

So living with them at Barn Cottage was fifteen-year-old William, who also worked on the farm with his father, Florence who was thirteen, Alice who was ten, John who was eight, Edith who was five and Hilda who was two.

I actually don't know what happened to Annie and Agnes, but Elsie worked as a kitchen maid, and died in 1923 when she was just nineteen. I've tried to find out what happened there, but nothing seems to come up. Her name just sits in the death records, standing out conspicuously in a list of people who died in their sixties or older. 

Her father, William, made more of a media splash when he passed away in 1926, with his obituary pointing out that he was a member of his local workers union. Evidently he was a pretty prominent figure in the community. 

By the 1930s, none of the Preece family were living in Barn Cottage. This isn't at all surprising really. If occupation is conditional for employment, and the farms devoted employee was dead, then the family can't really stick around. Worth noting is that little Hilda Preece went on to become a tailor for the military during the war. That's pretty cool. 

Thomas Morgan, the enigmatic owner of Barn Cottage, placed an advert in the paper in February 1951, advertising it alongside a job vacancy for a farm worker. In May, the Minshull family moved in. This was John and Beatrice, and their seven children, one of which was a newborn. 

The only problem is, John didn't stick around. He stopped working on the farm in August, and the family was given notice to leave the cottage. But John just flat-out abandoned his family, seemingly not even telling them that he'd stopped working at the farm, leaving his wife with seven children with no income, nowhere to go, and no plan. 

I hate to speak ill of the dead, but I think we can all agree, John's a bit of a cunt. Unless he actually was dead, in which case I take it back. The only information I have is that he vanished, and his family were now living in a house whose tenancy was dependant on employment that they were not able to provide. Being a single parent to seven is two full-time jobs already. 

Mr Morgan did eventually seek legal action to shift the Minshulls from Barn Cottage, and the media kinda portrayed him as some sort of ogre. But if we look at the dates, John left in August 1951, and Mr Morgan finally took legal action to evict the family in June 1952, giving Beatrice until September to sort everything out. That seems pretty generous, although it's still pretty lousy for poor Beatrice who perhaps didn't have much of a support network. Her defence in court was described as "a rather dismal story of the defendants circumstances," and they did ask Mr Morgan if he could give her more time. Rather coldly, he just said that he was short on farm labourers, and that tenancy at Barn Cottage is on a service basis. The house should be used to accommodate a future employee.

And that does make sense, and he did give her well over a year to sort stuff out, but his words kinda fall flat when we consider that it can't have been abandoned much later than Beatrice Minshulls eviction. I have the first-hand account of an old gent who claimed that he played in this house as a child when it was abandoned. But then Mr Morgan also passed away in 1960, so perhaps that's why. Employing people is kinda difficult when you're dead. 

I do wonder what became of Beatrice Minshull and her children. Her horde of seven would all be elderly now. I also wonder about John Minshull who seemingly vanished. I haven't been able to find much on him. The local papers at the time talk about a different John Minshull, one who ran away at the age of seventeen to marry his love, eighteen-year-old Hazel Castor. But that can't possibly be the same guy. I kinda wish it was, because his story is well-documented and quite lovely. Despite being dismissed as teenage runaways in the 1950s, they were still happily married in 1998. 

But for John Minshull the runaway husband, and his poor wife Beatrice, the trail runs cold. 

It's sad really, because as much as these records can give me a glimpse into the lives of past occupants, there's so much to their stories that remains hidden. 

Apart from names in a register, the only clue that they ever existed is this crumbly little house. 

With the house so ruinous, it's kinda nice to see the door still intact. This is the door that Beatrice Minshull once walked through with her horde of children, thinking that she and her husband were going to make a nice little life for themselves. It's the same door she later closed for the last time, miserable at the unexpected turn that her life had taken. 

It seems she passed away in Cheshire in 1966.

That's all I've got. Poor Barn Cottage isn't any urbexers wet dream, and it's certainly not this blogs magnum opus. But for this renegade tourist it made for a fun jolly into the Shropshire countryside to catalogue something that often goes overlooked.

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