The surrounding Farms

This photograph, taken around 1910 shows the Pilgrims Way at the foot of Westerham Hill. On the left the corner of the stone barn at Betsoms Farm and on the right the wall and railings surrounding the farmhouse.

Edward Atkinson Boyes with the last working horse on the farm at Moorhouse in 1957

Chris Pickett remembered local farms in the 1960s "...The farms were much as they are today, with the exception of Clemens Farm that was at Court Lodge, and the other, Bakers Farm at Delegarde in the Croydon Road. Both of these farms had milk rounds that supplied the whole of Westerham, delivered from churns carried on a horse drawn float. The milk was then dipped out of the two gallon churns into jugs on the door step. They did this twice a day when I was a lad, from Bakers Farm, morning and evening. Another thing that is hard to believe today, is that the herd of thirty or more cows were driven up the High Street from a field down by the old water mill, to the Croydon Road farm for milking and then back to the field again. This went on until about 1930..."

June Heath looked back on her childhood and remembered the extended holiday and ‘double summer-time’ to enable completion of the harvest. She described one of the local farms “...up at Force Green, where Hartley Road is now, was where the strawberry fields were and up the top of those fields past the farm were the pea fields and potato fields which I knew very well because my grandma used to work on the land - more there than at Gaysham. Jack Steven was a tenant farmer and rented the land off Major Warde. They had a big dairy herd there too and were probably the biggest dairy farm then, as Delegarde farm had closed...” As well as maintaining the strawberry fields and harvesting pea and potato crops Force Green Farm also grew mangolds and cattle cabbage for feed, produced cereal crops including wheat and oats and retained some orchard land for mixed ‘kitchen’ apples and Lambourne and Cox varieties of dessert apples.

Don Adams “...when I worked at Squerryes Farm they had two big friesian bulls called ‘Squerryes Eureka’ and ‘Squerryes Atom’, bloomin’ big things they were. They were kept in the stalls beside the dairy in that long building on the left as you go up Goodley Stock. Well, if you look carefully at the brickwork of the wall by the side of the road you can clearly see two sections where the bricks have been replaced. Those two bulls used to knock their heads against the wall until they’d both bashed a hole in it, so that they could look across the road into the fields. As fast as Harry had the bricks replaced, they’d bash them out again, and they’d ‘moo’ at you through the hole as you walked past - it’d scare the living daylights out of you if you didn’t expect it... ...as you drive out of Westerham just past Farley Lane, the field on the right was the bean field. The men would put up the poles and the women would do the stringing at the start of the growing season and the picking at the end. We grew potatoes over there too, and had a couple of cornfields up at Covers, but that’s all gone now. They were by the sandpits and I used to drive my tractor along the edge of the cornfields and look down on the men digging the sand out in big steps, by hand. Some days I’d sit up there with my legs dangling over the side eating my sandwiches and watching them work.

Betty New (née Boyes) was born at Moorhouse Farm in 1931 “...I remember my father Edward Boyes going to Friend and Nightingall, the auctioneers in Westerham to organise selling cattle at the market. As a child on the farm I would feed the calves and chickens before I went to school and one special job every so-often would be to walk the carthorses one-at-a-time along the Limpsfield Road to Mr Verrall to get them shod. I would walk them into the forge, then stay watching him work and chatting to him. I used to love the smell of the hot shoe burning into the hoof. I learnt to milk the cows when I was quite young, and used to go on the milk round with a dairyman on the pony and trap. We bottled the milk in the dairy on the farm in quarts, pints and half-pints, and the milkman would collect the empties while on the round. All my memories of growing up on the farm were happy ones - I didn’t want to go to school, I thought that was a waste of time and I’d rather be working on the farm or with the animals. I spent a lot of time with my father and always enjoyed helping him, though I was better with horse-work, I wasn’t very good with a tractor. We grew some oats and grass and I would get involved with hay turning and hay raking and gathering the sheaths to make the stookes. Another job we had to do was stone-picking - that never stopped, but I don’t think we ever grew potatoes. I remember washing the floor in the dairy and cow-sheds wasn’t easy as we had to get the water by bucket from a dipping hole in the stream on the other side of the road - I carried a lot of buckets, I remember that much" - she laughs.