Smallbrook Farm, Ryde, IOW
This article appeared in Issue 70 of Buckets & Spades Journal. It was written by Jo Banks who had researched into a farm that her relatives had owned on the Isle of Wight.
A pdf copy of this article is available for download using the link below.
Smallbrook Farm, Ryde, IOW
My grandmother and her brother and sisters and their father were all born at Smallbrook Farm near Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. My great grandfather Walter Uriah Russell and his father Walter Charles Russell had both farmed Smallbrook. Although I knew what the farm house looked like, both from paintings and photographs, and a few of names of the fields and copses, I had no idea how big the farm was.
I visited the record office in Newport to look at maps of the area, the O.S. maps were very helpful in identifying the farmhouse and buildings, but did not show the boundaries. I was then shown the Tithe map dating from 1840 together with the apportionments book. By looking up the landowner, who I knew at that time to be the Oglander family who owned the whole of the Nunwell estate, I was able to find the tenent farmer. Each field or copse on the map had a number, and in the book there was a name and description of land and premises for each, along with the state of cultivation, quantities in statute measure (acres, roods and perches) and the amount of rent apportioned upon the land and who it was payable to.
I was able to construct my own map from this with the following information about each area; name, size, type of land. There were two houses on the farm in the 1840 map, the top one probably being a farm workers cottage. The farmhouse itself is in the middle. It was interesting that the copses were not rented out with the farm in 1840, but were kept for the sole use of the landowner.
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