Water End Farm Eversholt

Water End Farm February 2016

Water End Farm is an impressive complex adjoining the road from Woburn to Steppingley. In 1877 the tenant was William Goodman who left in that year [SF18/33].

The Rating and Valuation Act 1925 specified that every building and piece of land in the country was to be assessed to determine its rateable value. The valuer visiting the farm [DV1/H5/36] found it was owned by the Duke of Bedford’s London and Devon Estates Company and occupied by H J Humphreys whose rent, fixed in 1921, was £229. The farm comprised 218 acres. The valuer commented: “Water from pump (pumped by engine to cistern over house). Lighting lamps. Sanitation Cesspool. Market Bedford 9 miles, station 3½. Saw Mr Humphreys who says that the back land is very light with a patch of bad land towards Tingrith. Troubled by game”. A colleague wrote on 29th April 1927: “A nice farm as regards position and buildings but the land has no body in it”.

The farmhouse has two reception rooms, a kitchen and scullery, office and dairy in a half-basement. Four bedrooms lay upstairs with a boxroom, WC and bathroom with hot and cold water. A brick and slate coal barn and a wood and corrugated iron garage both stood outside.

The main part of the homestead was in five blocks:

• a brick and slate food store and five-bay open cowshed for thirteen;
• a loose box for calves, a cowhouse for nine, a chaffhouse, a millhouse (including flour store, grinding room (two stones), a cake store, an engine house (with Blackstone oil engine) and a loft over with six bins and three hoppers), a hand hoist, a barn, a root store with a loft over, a chaffhouse, a three-bay open cart shed with a loft over, another chaffhouse and a stable for six. At the rear of the block was a two-bay open cart shed;
• a harness room, a three-bay open cart shed, a two-stall stable and a trap house;
• five pigsties, a cowhouse for ten and a boiler house;
• a fowl house, a loose box and a four-bay open shed.

On a field was a wood and tiled barn and a pigsty and in another field was a wood and tiled four-bay open shed, a fowl house and a second open shed. H J Humphreys seems to have been succeeded as tenant by C Banks, who left in 1937 [BML10/25/3].