Hill Farm
Apparently a dwelling on this site was recorded in the Domesday book as a shepherds cottage. Part of the house dates back to Henry VII but it has been added to at various stages over the centuries.
At the time of the 1806 Inclosure Act where Hill Farm can be found today appears to have been largely Plot No 24 with a piece of Plot No 21. The buildings shown at Plot No 20, house, barn and cottage, are no longer there but I believe survived into the twentieth century.
In 1838 this was No 38, known as The Hill, and was cottages and gardens owned by Edward Webb of the Norton Court Estate and let to Henry Simmons and Thomas Merriman. Presumably Henry Simmons was in the cottage at Plot No 20 on the 1806 plan, that is no longer there, and Thomas Merriman at what became Hill Farm.
The Simmons family owned several properties and some land around this area. Henry was likely the son of William and Elizabeth Simmons who were living where Fir Tree Cottage now stands at this time. Henry was born at Norton in 1798, married Emily Trinder at Sandhurst in 1820, and in 1841 was an agricultural labourer living with his wife and two sons. Thomas Merriman was living with his wife Mary and two adult children at what was already named ‘Hill Farm’.
In 1851 Henry Simmons was living in the household of his son Charles, his wife and daughter, ‘near Norton House’. Thomas Merriman is still in this area in 1851 but it’s not clear exactly where he was living. He was then 75 years old, an agricultural labourer and pauper originally from Elmstone Hardwicke. There is also a Henry Mann, 50 year old agricultural labourer, living with his wife Eliza, daughter and George Moulder, an agricultural labourer who was lodging with them.
The 1860s weren’t a good decade for those living at or near Hill Farm. Henry Simmons was still at Norton living with his wife and young granddaughter in 1861 but he died in September 1863. Wife Emily died whilst living at Gloucester in March 1866 but was returned to Norton for burial at St Mary’s. Thomas Merriman died in the Gloucester Union Workhouse in January 1866. Norton Court Estate papers from 1861 record that two cottages and gardens here were in the occupation of Henry Mann. This must be the old farmhouse at Plot No 24 and the cottage at Plot No 20 that is no longer here. Henry Mann was still living with his wife Eliza and had another lodger in 1861 but died in 1868. Henry’s widow Eliza remained at Norton until she died in 1873.
In April 1868, a declaration by Mr Bruton with respect to Land Tax of the Norton Court Estate, records that William Turk was at Hill Farm on a yearly tenancy paying £10-0s-0d. This would have been William, son of William and Elizabeth Turk born at Norton in 1832. The family appear to have lived near Cold Elm when William jnr was growing up and he followed his father into the trade of chairmaking. William married Ann Perkins, also of Norton, at Cheltenham in 1857 and may have come to Hill Farm straight after marriage.
The next time Hill Farm can be positively identified is in 1891 when William Turk, then a 55 year old cabinet maker, is still living here with his wife Ann and daughter in law, Lizzie. It is likely that the Turks had been here throughout. William died in May 1891 and by 1901 widow Ann had left Norton and was living with her married son Charles at Edwy Parade, Gloucester, where she died in 1909.
In 1897 Charles Ellis is qualified to vote due to land and tenement at Hill Farm, Norton, where he was living. Charles was a pig dealer and had been at Norton, likely Hill Farm, since 1894 presumably when Ann Turk left.
In 1898-99 Harry Crump was here briefly.
In 1900-01 the property was held by William Mann and from 1901 John Mann. In April 1905 we find an administration order made in Gloucester County Court against John Mann, a carter of Wainlode Hill, Norton. John owed £45 7s 3½d and had offered to repay 7s 6d in the pound at a rate of 6s per month. He stated that he had had fourteen children and that eight of them were still at home and depending upon him. The order was granted. At the time of the 1901 census, John Mann was a farmer living at Hill Farm with his wife Deborah, eleven children at home, one of them married and widowed and with a son of her own also in residence. Deborah was employed as a laundress and washerwoman. Although living at Norton none of the large family had actually been born here with places of birth from Tibberton, Hartpury, Redmarley and Highnam. In 1908 John and Deborah Mann paid £24 10s for Norton Court Estate Ladyday rent and they were still here in 1915.
In 1924 Christopher and Blanche Davis were here. Christopher Harry Leach Davis had married Blanche Witts at Sandhurst in 1916.
In 1924-25 William James Ryder.
1926 saw the arrival of Henry Arthur and Vera Eliza Cook. ‘Harry’, as he was known, was born at Norton in July 1897, the son of Arthur Joseph Cook and Mary Elizabeth nee Pope. The Cook family appear to have arrived at Norton from Boddington in the late 1870s and took over the tenancy of Court Farm. By 1901 Arthur had taken over the farm from his parents and Harry was there with a brother and two sisters. All were still in residence at Court Farm in 1911, about the time the following group photo was taken. Harry later saw army service in the First World War.
Harry, standing, to the left with his family at Court Farm and in uniform during WW1
In 1939 Harry was recorded as a farmer, stock breeder and senior air warden, and wife Vera a WVS air warden, and they were still at Hill Farm with their children. Harry left Hill Farm in 1948 when the couple took on Court Farm from his parents and Frederick H, Marjory L Cole and their daughter Denise moved here from 26 Tythe Cottages, at the bottom of the lane to Hill Farm.
In 2009 Denise Blanchard (nee Cole) shared her memories of the family’s time at Hill Farm; “I lived in the cottages at Hill Farm with my mother and father till I was about seven. Capt Norton Walker owned all the cottages, the houses and the farms. Harry Cook said to my father one day that he was moving to Court Farm to where his father had lived and his father then had passed away and Harry Cook was taking over Court Farm and Hill Farm would become empty. He said to my father, Tim, why don’t you go and try and see if you can rent it. So my father made an appointment to see Capt Norton Walker. I remember in this little old Austin 7 car we went down the drive to the manor house, my father took his cap off, stood at the door, and rang that big bell that echoed all the way up the corridor and he was shown in. He went to see the squire and Capt Norton Walker always referred to people by their surnames and never a ‘mister’ in front of it so it was just Cole, what do you want. My father said he wondered if he would consider him as a tenant for Hill Farm. He said come back in a week’s time and I’ll let you know. My father recalled it as being the longest week of his life and a week later went back to see Capt Norton Walker to be told he could rent Hill Farm.
So after moving Mr & Mrs Cook and the family down to Court Farm it was our turn to go to Hill Farm and I remember the day I went to school and my mother said if you come in from school and we’re not at the cottage, then you make your way up to the top of the drive and Hill Farm and you’ll see the horse and cart in the yard and we’ll be unloading furniture. And sure enough they were.
I remember Hill Farm as being such a cold old farmhouse. The front door was like Norton Church door and the key was about the same size as the church key. It was just wattle and daub walls, flagstones and no heating. My father got a Calor gas cooker with the Calor gas bottles and you could guarantee that half way through cooking a meal a bottle would go and would have to be changed. Our only lighting was Tilley lamps and we had no water. We had a pump in the yard that would go dry in May. We’d have to fetch our water in churns from the old spring by the pump house. And then my father laid a plastic pipe along the top of the ground from the spring to our house but you could be sure that a cow would stand on the pipe and split it so we would have to go across and join it up. That’s the first memories I have of Hill Farm.
It was 15 acres of ground with Hill Farm and my father, first chance he had to get to market after moving in, he went and bought some milking cows and as I recall, my father was the only farmer that milked by hand as many cows as he did. My father milked about twelve cows each night and morning by hand.
My father, from the years he had spent in the butchery world with the butcher that he worked for, my father became an extremely good butcher. He had the license in the village for the slaughtering of peoples animals. Most people who lived in the little cottages had a pig cot at the top of their garden and they would have a pig fattening up for their yearly supply of bacon. Also most of the farmers had pigs to be killed as well. My father would either go to their place if it was convenient or the animals would come to the farm. I always remember my father had a humane killer where he would shoot them and then they were put on a bale of straw to burn all the hair off then they would be hung up in the barn and all the insides taken out. My father would then cure the hams and bacon which took about six to eight weeks and then they were put to dry and the people who owned the pigs would come to collect them.
Apart from the 15 acres of land that went with Hill Farm, my father also helped Harry Cook with the land that went with Court Farm and my father would run a lot of sheep on some of the ground there and at lambing time we used to use the barn across from Hill Farm. Come out of the lane from Hill Farm and on the opposite side of the road on the next bend going down to Court Farm was a big yard with a building and lots of loose boxes that you could take care of the lambing of the sheep. At lambing time we used to use this yard and we used to tie sheaves of corn round to keep the bitter wind out and we used to put the sheep that were going to lamb that night into the pens and my father and me would take it in turns through the night to go down to keep an eye on them all. Quite often when we would have a lamb that was fostered onto another sheep we would have to put them in a loose box and try to get the mother to adopt them. I always used to take the collie dogs with me and a couple of bottles of milk in my pockets so that I could take care of the lambs that needed a drink. My father used to do exactly the same thing but we used to try and take it in turns because there were times when I wasn’t quite old enough to go and relieve my dad of the night shift and he would not get undressed and into bed for three weeks at a time when the lambing season was taking place. If we had a lamb that was born dead we would try to take a lamb from one of the ewes who had twins and foster this onto the other ewe so that she could have a lamb and they all would have a better chance with having just one lamb each. But the sheep were very sensitive and knew it wasn’t their lamb and either my father or I would take the skin off the dead lamb and carry it on the lamb that we were trying to foster and hope that she would take to it and sometimes it worked and sometimes it took a few more days. They have much better ideas now I believe, they have much simpler ideas, you don’t have to go to those lengths anymore.
We always had horses at Hill Farm. That was my father’s first love I would say and butchery his second. My father would break in horses for people so you never knew what horse was coming to stay next and you never knew which horse he would be riding out. I always had a pony of my own and I always rode the same pony but my dad you never knew what horse he was going to ride and if ever anyone had a problem with a horse they would come along and see if Tim could sort it out and he usually did.
Amongst all of the horses we used to have was Major who worked hard around the farm. We used to have a cider press that required the turning of a wooden bar to extract the juice from the apples and this was one of Major’s jobs. We harnessed him to the bar and he walked around and around. The only problem was that he needed someone to supervise him and make sure he didn’t stop and that became my job. Often I seemed to be doing this for hours thinking that everyone had forgotten about me. Major also used to pull the small cart that took us backwards and forwards to Gloucester for the markets. One day I was up in the woods on top of the hill and heard a lot of commotion at the farm. Hurrying down I found that Major had fallen into the pond and was stuck up to his shoulders in the mud. Everyone came to help pull him out and with the aid of a tractor we finally saved him. What with mechanisation you don’t get to see horses working on the local farms anymore these days.
We had lived at Hill Farm a very short time when Capt Norton Walker passed away and, as you know, the whole of Norton Estate was sold and at the auction the only two places that did not sell was Harry Cook’s place at Court Farm and Hill Farm. Brookes’ at Sandhurst bought Court Farm after the sale then that just left Hill Farm remaining and Mr Bruton rang my dad one day and called him into the office and said that Hill Farm is the only place that’s not been sold, we need to wind this estate up, can we come to some arrangement. And I remember my father coming back home and saying that he had agreed to buy Hill Farm. The money he’d made through butchery over his lifetime, my mother and father had managed to save £1000 which would be more like £100,000 today I would well imagine and they put £1000 down on Hill Farm and they mortgaged themselves for £600 so the actual price of Hill Farm was £1600. [In the catalogue for the sale of the Norton Court Estate in 1952 the farm was described as a fruit growing and rearing farm of 12 acres and it is recorded that it was bought by the tenant for £2600].
My father after buying Hill Farm went to a sale at Innsworth, some Nissan huts were being sold which were surplus to requirements following the war. My father bought two Nissan huts and brought them home and had them erected at Hill Farm. They then ran deep litter hens in them. The deep litter hens had to have so many hours light a day to lay the eggs that was required to make them profitable but of course there was no electricity. My mother and father would get up at 3 o’clock in the morning g and I can hear them pumping those Tilley lamps up in the kitchen and they would take them down and hang them on hooks in the chicken houses to get the chickens up and feeding to get the production of eggs that was required. He eventually got an electric line laid in. It came up across the orchard at the bottom, the bottom orchard, it came up by where the red brick wall is, and came up across the orchard and into the house. And the next thing, one day we had electricity and my mother had a timing switch where she could set the timing clocks for the lights to come on to feed the chickens and my mother and father didn’t have to get up at that unearthly hour in the mornings.
We also did a lot of Christmas poultry. Monica Cook and I used to be kept home from school two weeks prior to Christmas to pick the Christmas poultry and we used to sit in the old shed with hessian sacks over us and we’d pick away all day and my mother would do the dressing of the birds and my dad would always pick the geese in the orchard, standing up down in the orchard in the cold. We used to sit on chairs and have a nice old log fire going and sit there all day picking these chickens. Off course, as I’ve said, Hill Farm was a very, very cold house so the birds used to keep and of course the winters seemed to be colder then and the big room in Hill Farm, we eventually turned into the bar place, we would take all the carpets up and we would lay newspaper down on the whole floor and they would be laid out with all the Christmas birds with peoples orders with their names on them and they used to come and collect them for Christmas.
The only social activity I ever remember enjoying at the farm was going fox hunting with my father, maybe twice a week, and that was the one pleasure that we had together, really enjoyed. My mother never did ride horses.
In the latter years of my father’s life, financially he found it a little difficult to make ends meet out of the farm as things had become more streamlined and just out of 15 acres it wasn’t possible to make a good living so my mother started taking in bed & breakfast people and she advertised in a holiday book for farm holidays and my mother used to do bed & breakfast and evening meal and people would come back year after year. Their children would enjoy helping my father around the farm, feed the pigs, collect the eggs, feed the ducks, geese, and get the cows in for milking. Of course people didn’t worry quite so much then, there wasn’t the health and safety restrictions that there are today to let children enjoy this. There was always a lot of fruit to be collected as well.
In January ’63 my father became ill with a stroke and in the May he suffered another stroke and passed away at the age of 58. That was the terrible winter of ’63, it started snowing on Boxing Day and snowed all the way through. The water pipes up the stairs were frozen solid so we couldn’t get any water up to the toilet and it was bitter, bitter cold.
My mother passed away the following year, 18 months after my father, at the age of 61. After the death of both my parents then the divorce of my first husband I had to try once again to make Hill Farm pay. I opened up a tea room, I had a couple of lodgers, I did bed & breakfast and evening meals, I rented all my ground out to farmers, so I could get some income from that cause I didn’t have any other income coming in. I had no maintenance support for my two children so I decided to do all those things to help it pay and we struggled by. We used to pick the fruit out the orchard and sell them, plums for sale. Then one day Mr Ibbertson, Ken Ibbertson, from Longlevens School, who was one of my son’s teachers, rang me and said would I be interested in doing a lunch for his mother for her birthday as she didn’t want to go to a restaurant or a pub and so Barbara and I started doing it. Barbara Ainge and myself and we worked out a menu and a price and we did our first dinner party, well lunch party, it was a Sunday lunch. It went off extremely well, it was very successful and I had numerous phone calls from school afterwards asking me if I would do a party for them and that’s how it started. I never advertised my parties once and by the time I retired I was averaging one every other day. Obviously people wanted to drink with their meal and I used to make a lot of homemade wines; elderflower, elderberry, dandelion – you name it, I made it. I used to sell carafes of wine with the meals, reds and whites, and then I got a tip off that I was being reported to the licensed victuallers for not having a license so in desperation I rang my solicitor and he said, I had a marvellous solicitor, he was always so quick thinking, he said increase the price of your meal, tell your party guests what you are doing, and that it includes the wine and that you’ll make it as a gift. So we got away with that for quite a while and I gave the parties making a gift of the wine. Then people wanted to bring along casks of beer and bottles of spirits and they wouldn’t go home and we couldn’t get locked up and they had too much to drink. So with a new man coming into my life, who turned out to be my second husband Arnie, we converted my dad’s cowshed into en-suite bedrooms and a breakfast room and we decided to apply for a license, an alcohol license, for Hill Farm. We got a license passed through the courts and my husband built a beautiful bar and we were able to control the amount of alcohol that people had. We were the first people to get an alcohol license to Hill Farm. It was only a restaurant license but it gave us the control over the amount of drink that people had and we ran that for about six years until my husband had a massive heart attack on the Christmas week and passed away and I tried very hard to run it. That was in ’92 and I ran Hill Farm until ’99 but my health failed and I was just trying to do too much. It wasn’t possible for me to be able to keep it going. So I was able to sell Hill Farm”.
Was marketed by Humberts of Cheltenham, in April 1993 at £350,000; "a detached listed period country house of character currently used as a successful restaurant plus five letting bedrooms and owners accommodation, the whole standing in a lovely position within its own ten acres. Entrance hall, lounge bar, superb dining room in two sections, well fitted modern fitted kitchen plus separate cooking and food preparation rooms, sitting room, residents dining room, utility room, 2 ground floor bedroom suites, 4 first floor bedrooms, bathroom, shower room, 2 separate washrooms, delightful second floor owners sitting room. The whole about 10 acres".
[April 1993]
In 2002 Nicholas J and Richenda G Hine were here.
Hill Farm is now a grde II listed building described as a former farmhouse of late 17th to early 18century date, now a house, known as Hill Farm, Bishop's Norton. The listing records; “Former farmhouse now house. Late C17, early C18, C19. Brick and square-panelled timber-framing with unpainted brick infill, red tile roof and thatch with decorative ridge. Late C17-early C18 brick block with almost square plan left, timber-framed and brick extension set back on right with C19 brick extension onto right gable-end. Brick block left with gable facing front; 2½ storeys. C20 two-light casement lighting ground floor, 3-light window to first floor with original soldier-arched head, single light C20 window right, large 2-light C20 casement with glazing bars lighting garret, bands between storeys. C20 part-glazed door up C20 steps right. Timber-framed block; 1½ storeys, single eyebrow dormer left with 2-light casement. Single light and 2-light casements with and without horizontal glazing bars lighting ground floor. Brick buttress right. Single storey C19 extension; C19 plank door and casement window. Massive composite stack at junction of brick and timber-framed parts. Right-hand end of timber-framed part, hipped”.
