Fir Grove

Fir Grove – believed from the 1950s

After the large auction of three of the village farms in 1869 – ‘Lot 1’, the farm at Fir Grove, had a period of turbulent ownership.  Much of this resulted from the fall in land prices in the early 1870s when USA farming expanded and was able to flood the British market with lower-cost produce.  The depression in British land prices would have been especially difficult for anyone who was heavily exposed through a large mortgage for farmland.  At that time, the new owners of Fir Grove Farm were ensnared in this problem and, eventually, resulting from the death of a lender, a bankruptcy ensued. 

The legal consequences remained for years.  The Thorpe sisters became the new owners – with Dennis William Long as a new Fir Grove tenant farmer from 1889.  The owners saw him as a potential buyer but, reading between the lines, the parties appear to have had difficulty in agreeing on an acceptable price. 

The early 1900s auction booklet for Fir Grove. Courtesy of Wymondham Town Archive.
Inside one of the old barns
– probably several hundred years old

Eventually, in June 1912, there was a sale.  Dennis William Long offered £3,000 and the deal was done. In the years since the 1869 auction, the monetary value of Fir Grove had fallen by more than half.

The 1912 sale map of Fir Grove. Courtesy of Wymondham Town Archive.
Victor Dennis Long’s stencil for despatching farm produce to travel from Ashwellthorpe Station – perhaps the stencil was too small for the second ‘L’?
The ever-resourceful Victor Dennis Long’s advertisement in a London Newspaper (1918) offered to despatch eggs from Ashwellthorpe Station at 5s 6d per dozen providing the buyer paid in advance (including transportation) and also sent their own packing case!
Optimism aside, the railway was a boon for local farmers who were able to tap into whole new markets – the equivalent of today’s road transportation.
With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive.

Farm lives can take many unexpected turns. There was an interesting court case in the early 1900s.

The post WW2 years saw the introduction of new equipment including two (second-hand) combines. Government grants were eagerly taken up – both to improve efficiencies and increase the overall production levels of food.

Fir Grove was used to demonstrate the benefits of this new age to farmers across the area. Maybe this was helped by a ‘Min of Ag’ office which had been set up, nearby, on the post WW2 Hethel airfield?

One of the two post WW2 combines

In 1946, the harvest was greatly assisted by the arrival of a new grain dryer (partly shown in the background of the photo).

Here are William Brown (cowman), William Copeman (horseman), Geoffrey Deller (holidaying school teacher – front right) and William Welton (cowman) all getting on with the job.

Elsewhere, we have seen information about sowing and cropping from other farms during the 1800s. Here is a page extracted from a farm notebook for Fir Grove relating to 1947 and part of 1948.

The present-day National Heritage List for England includes the farmhouse at Fir Grove.

Cheriton Cottage

In the second half of the 1900s, Ian and Joan Foster were visiting their Long family friends at Fir Grove when Ian described his dream of making his wood-turning hobby into a full-time job. They fleshed out the idea and intimated that Wreningham would be a fine location for the venture. The problem of finding a place where they could live and work was solved when Dennis Long offered to help convert Fir Grove’s old farm stables into accommodation, and for Ian to re-purpose the adjacent cow shed into the necessary workshop.  The deal was done. 

The Fosters duly named their new (ex-stables) home ‘Cheriton Cottage’ in memory of the Hampshire village where they had previously lived.

Ian’s first wood-turned products were small novelty mice (and other animals) which he sold in great numbers to a Surrey-based customer.  After getting the business onto a firm footing, they graduated to making wooden furniture – often using English hardwoods.  They also made specialist wooden items for the repair of antiques, as well as other bespoke wooden products. They often found new customers through trade shows.

In the run-up to the Queen Elizabeth Silver Jubilee in 1977, and impressed with his wood-working skills, the village commissioned Ian to create a new village sign. 

The sign was fabricated from English Oak and made in several parts. It included a central wooden column fashioned from an old oak beam from a village barn. 

The sign’s construction became Ian’s biggest single job, and the sign – combined with a new brick and stone planter – took its place at the Reading Room site, adjacent to the school crossroads, where it remains today.

More photographs and information can be found on the Reading Room page.

Ian Foster was responsible for the wooden village sign – made in English Oak – which was installed at the Reading Room in 1977 as part of the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee celebrations.

The Modern Era

As with many farms, there were business sidelines.  Until recently, the farm workshop still contained a jig which was used to make traditional wooden (‘five bar’) farm gates.  One of the fields includes an old gravel quarry, the contents of which were once used to repair Wreningham’s roads.

Starting in the late 1900s, about 70 acres of the farm were planted as woodland under a national scheme using native trees. Master-minded by Dennis Arthur Long – and known as Long’s Wood, it represents an investment for the future. 

A more recent addition has been the involvement in the Coronation Meadows project: a national initiative founded by (the then) HRH Prince Charles, aiming to reverse the decline of traditional hay meadows as well as create new ones using traditional local seeds from the area. This has resulted in a meadow at Fir Grove field receiving seeds which are native to this part of South Norfolk.

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