In the town where I was bored/Lived a pram who'd seen the bees

[hirez]

(You can blame silentq and the_axel for this.)

Holt Farm (1965 - 1976)

The kitchen garden looks to be completely grassed over and the greenhouse and shed are gone. The sheep-dip (LHS of top barn) appears to be missing, but the creosote pit (square roof outline at northernmost end of middle barn) survives.

Cotehay Farm (1976 - 1986)

The kitchen garden's gone (enclosure furthest south. See a pattern here?) as has the woodshed/chicken run (pointed at by the largest chimney-shadow) The building on the far western end of the main group was the Engine House. Before there was mains electricity, this was where the lighting plant and stationary engine that powered all the shafts that ran through the barns and dairy lived. We used what had been the grain store above the feed-mill as a rehearsal space.

There's a lot more; I seem to have lived in a number of places centred around the GL54 postcode. However, I'm rather disturbed to discover how much the places have changed now they're no longer working farm buildings.

It's strange but true: It weren't all fields round there when I were a lad.

Edit: Prompted by sheepthief I had a look at the same area on http://www.live.com. Because of the odd false colour it's a lot easier to see the site of an (alleged Roman) fortification (the vaguely circular outline in the lighter coloured field top right) in the field called 'The camp' and bottom left there's what seems to be a curving watercourse. That's the start of the river Coln, which is alleged to be one of the sources of the Thames. Charlton Pool's still missing, mind.

Comments

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

A while ago I was thinking of starting a meme: go to [select mapping thing of choice] and tell us about where you spent your childhood. I was prompted by the discovery that two of my favourite places have disappeared - the olympic-sized outdoor swimming pool at Trentham Gardens, now covered in trees, and the enormous super-pit Hem Heath Colliery, now completely flattened and turned to housing.

As for farming - I was pondering on the drive back from Whitby what use the land is being put to now. After all, with modern farming methods being much more productive, and with us also importing a whole load of foodstuffs that previously we'd have produced, surely there's a whole load of land that's now no longer used for farming. So what is it being used for? There's not been so great a population increase for it all to have been built on, and with manufacturing in decline it's not being used for that either. Has the increase in wealth meant that large numbers of the population have more land? Has a lot of it been given over to leisure pursuits?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what the numbers are. Most of the Charlton Abbotts estate is set-aside (or at least was the last time I could bring myself to look), which is theoretically ready to be pressed back into service should it become economic again. There have been golf courses, too. Elsewhere, people make money from tourism (convert all barns and outbuildings to holiday cottages & keep tame sheep for the townies to chase) or the land gets bought up by London scum wanting to spend their bonuses. Sevenhampton, the next village along, has almost no permanent residents since it's mostly weekenders. Perhaps it will follow Old Sennington, which was abandoned due to plague.

[redcountess]

*None* of my childhood homes in Melbourne are standing anymore - the house in Glen Iris (1965-1967) was demolished when they extended the municipal pool complex next door, the house in Chadstone (1967-1972) had its land subdivided in the 90s and new houses built on each parcel of land (I was able to go back and visit it before it was demolished, which was bittersweet), and East Malvern (1972 until I left home in 1985) was demolished for a student accommodation complex in 2001.

ps

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

You might also find decent images at http://www.live.com, or images from a different year - they have hi-res images for where I am now where Google doesn't.

Re: ps

[hirez.livejournal.com]

See edit. At the moment, Google wins. Just.

Re: ps

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

I don't know about it being false-colour - probably it's just a different season. Google had some great shots of areas near Oxford where you could determine the ancient water courses by the different shades of the crops... until an update that was taken during a different season.

[redcountess]

Dude! I thought you were younger than me!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

No, I just act like a stroppy teenager...