|
|
|
LOWV walks -
Hoarwithy - Wye Hill and Red Rail, Wednesday 6th September |
|
Hoarwithy, Wednesday
6th September
Walk
of 3 miles to
Red Rail and Wye Hill led by Heather
Hurley for the Hoarwithy Club.
|
|
WYE
HILL
|
|
 |
Wye Hill is a steep wooded slope dotted
with cottages overlooking the Wye at Hoarwithy.
|
|
Its first
known documentation dates from 1681 in a Marriage
Settlement which also records the ‘Teytheing Barne’.
In 1703 Goodrich Manor listed the cottages of Richard
Howells, John Fisher and Thomas Davis as encroachments on
’Wyehill in the Township of Hentland Lanfrother’,
and in 1748 John Clarke of Hill Court, Walford, granted a
lease for 5s a year of ‘all that cottage, tenement
wherein the said Jane Howells doth now inhabit and dwell
together with the Garden and Orchard therein belongingto
belonging which said premises were thereforeto erected and
enclosed out of Waste or Common called Wye Hill’. |
|
 |
In 1833 Richard Price was living at Wye
Hill around the date that George James built his house and
buildings later known as the ‘Oddfellows Arms’. It
was constructed on a piece of land given to him by Richard
Price his father-in-law. Other families living as
freeholders on Wye Hill at this period were the Bevans,
Braces, Brislands, Cookes, Evans, Jones, Merediths,
Preeces, Pinches, Powles and Wargens.
|
|
The
inhabitants of Wye Hill during the 19th century
worked mainly as agricultural labourers, but there was
also a fisherman, a cooper, a thatcher, a shoemaker,
shepherd, gardener, journeyman, midwife, dressmaker,
haulier and a tailor. |
|
 |
Red Rail Farm |
|
In 1851 there was three licensed
properties on Wye Hill, the Fisherman’s Arms run by
Phillip Preece at an unknown location, the Yew Tree a
cider house sold in 1900 with its Cider Mill House,
piggery and 3 acres, and a beer house the Oddfellows
which had been renamed the Foresters. The later with its
skittle alley was built in 1834 and was sold in 1887 to
James Preece for £340 who closed the premises, which later
became a laundry. Cottages at the top of the hill were
supplied with water from the well, and those at the bottom
by a well near Red Rail, and access was gained by a cart
track which is now a footpath.
|
|
