Dorset - Greenlands Farm

A National Trust information board at Greenlands Farm

Greenlands Farm near Studland on the East Dorset coast near Poole, is one of my ancestral places – but more of that later. It’s also a wonderful landscape, whatever your connections. Here’s the map reference on the Geograph grid.

I visited and took these pictures on a damp day in August 2009.

Greenlands is now a site where the National Trust is undertaking one of the largest heathland restoration projects in the country. It took over the site in 1999.

This way sign for pony trekkers at Greenlands Farm points to Shell Bay and Studland village

This place reminds me of the land of a Thomas Hardy novel – although his Wessex stories were based at the other end of Dorset, in the west. Here nature is still bountiful and walking along the lanes between the fruit-laden hedgerows I feel I am in the footsteps of many a Victorian rural heroine. Or maybe just my 3-great grandmother Ann Read, a fisherman/farmer’s daughter who grew up in these acres.

The hedgerows hereabouts are fruitful - these are sloes, the fruit of the blackthorn

Hawthorn berries (haws) in the hedgerow

The elderberries are ripening in August

Later in the year there will be wild rosehips

Until the 1950s the area had been heathland for 2,000 years, but its “unique tapestry of wildlife” was lost when the land was ploughed up for agriculture. The soil was fertilised and grass replaced the heather.

A damp day around Greenlands Farm

Now sheep and cattle are allowed to graze to ensure trees do not establish and it is hoped the fertiliser will eventually wash away and heather will recolonise – it likes only thin, sandy soils.

The National Trust hopes heathland will reclaim the area from farmers' grass...

Some parts of the area are looking increasingly like heathland again

Hemp agrimony (Eupatorium cannabinum) - looking odd with those pale leaves - it grows near streams

A more recognisable specimen of hemp agrimony (Eupatorium cannabinum)

The distinctive, poor, sandy soil of the heath is reappearing...

Heather (Erica carnea) making a comeback...

Small furze (Ulex minor) among the grass...

Its yellow flowers long dead, tall common gorse or furze (Ulex europaeus)...

One heathland bird I did spot on my visit was the stonechat (Saxicola rubicola) – I did not get a very good picture as it was such a grey, damp day, but its stone-on-stone chatter made its identification obvious even though I had never seen one before.

A noisy stonechat (Saxicola rubicola) in the rain...

Much of the ancestral information below is from from Ruth Churchill Lancaster, a descendant of my 4-great-grandfather, John Read (born 1778 in Studland) via Harriot Read and Henry Churchill. I am descended from Harriot’s sister Ann, who married Richard Hayes, a fisherman from Poole.

On the 1841 census John Read (Fisherman) is shown as widowed, as his wife Sarah had died (age 63, on 16 June 1836, Studland). He spent that night on Brownsea Island with the newly wedded Henry and Harriot, although he is recorded as a “Fisherman of Greenland”.

The sea - Poole Harbour - is never far away in this part of Dorset

The National Trust confirms that back in 1810 John Read was the tenant of the land known as Greenland, being four enclosures of about 10 acres… this prior to his marriage to Sarah on 10 December 1811.

There's a sign for Greenlands Farm, but it's a bit vague...

An 1840 tithe map shows that John Read’s holding was a house with a garden and a five-acre arable plot together with some meadow land acreage, he is recorded on the map as landowner and occupier. The remains of this stone house/cottage are now sadly overgrown with woodland.

I had a feeling this was close to where my Read ancestors farmed...

... but then again, perhaps they farmed here...

Or then again this may be the ruin of the old farm...

Greenland is also known as Greenlands and that is what Ruth Churchill Lancaster’s great-grandparents called it. The smaller tenement was later amalgamated with Greenlands Farm itself (according to information from the National Trust archives) and this is confirmed later by the 1861 census which states that Henry Churchill is a farmer of 32 acres, increasing to 35 acres by 1871.

Henry and Harriot brought up all of their seven children at Greenlands Farm, but sadly the oldest daughter, also a Harriot, died aged 14 in 1856 and then his wife Harriot died aged 45 when the youngest child George was just eight years old.

Three years later Henry re-married Hester Squires and went on to have two more children. They all lived at Greenlands Farm.

A clump of trees huddle together on the farmed land

An unexpected blue conifer overhangs the path

At this time usually the eldest son would inherit, but oldest son Isaac Churchill was not interested in farming; he was a shipbuilder and metal worker in Southampton, never married and died aged 46 in 1893, leaving Job as the eldest son.

Job had worked alongside his father all his life, earliest occupation as a dairyman, and in 1891 he is recorded as a farmer (rather than a farm worker) as he had now taken over Greenlands Farm from his retired father Henry, who died a few years later in 1897.

Greenlands Farm remained in the family until around 1905, almost a century occupied by the same family. Meanwhile my ancestor Ann was firmly a fisherman’s wife in Poole.

I do love lichen...

The trees are old and damp here and covered with lichen

More trees are being planted on the edge of the heathland

Another National Trust sign for Greenlands Farm