Hardy Farm ..... on the edge of the Township

 This is Hardy Farm at the end of Hardy Lane, and you will have to be of an age to remember it.

Hardy Farm, 1965

It has gone now, but it appears on Yate’s map of Lancashire for 1786 and may date back further into the 18th century.

In 1845 it was home to tenant farmer John Cook who farmed 29 acres of meadow, arable and pasture, included in which there was three quarters of an acre of woodland and an acre of orchard.

Four years earlier the census records that he lived here with his wife, five children and Thomas Hand.

The family were methodists and his standing in the community was such that he was a member of the Rate Payer’s Committee and in 1848 was one of the two elected Overseers for the Committee.

The farm stood on the edge of Chorlton and strictly was in the small hamlet of Hardy out by the River Mersey.

Hardy, Chorlton and bit more, 1830

This was a lonely spot which at one point in 1830 could boast five cottages as well as the farm.

But the cottages appear to have been progressively abandoned with the last residents leaving in the early 1850s.

Location; Hardy

Pictures; Hardy Farm, 1965 from the 1965 Collection, and Hennet’s map of Lancashire 1830

The revoluton that was farming .......today on the wireless

Now this programme, on Agriculture, from the series A Pyrotechnic History of Humanity, intrigues me.

It is the second of four episode.

"In part two of his history of the human use of energy, Justin Rowlatt explores what was the original solar energy revolution – harnessing the sun’s rays to grow food. Some 10,000 years ago our ancestors began to till the soil, producing the energy surpluses needed to feed the first cities and civilisations.

Growing crops was gruelling work, as Justin discovers at Butser Ancient Farm, when he tries to till some soil himself with a replica Stone Age mattock. Resident archaeologist Claire Walton gives Justin a tour through ten millennia of British farming history.

But what first prompted our ancestors to take up such an arduous way of life in the first place? Anthropologist Robert Bettinger thinks it was down to the unusually benign conditions since the end of the last Ice Age. In any case, agriculture delivered domesticated plants and animals that could sustain much bigger human populations, according to Mark Nesbitt of Kew Gardens, and Melinda Zeder of the Smithsonian Institution. And that in turn made the discovery of radical new technologies possible.

Producer: Laurence Knight

Presenter: Justin Rowlatt

Studio manager: Rod Farquhar

Production co-ordinator: Zoe Gelber

Editor: Rosamund Jones"*

Picture; The valley, 7,000 years ago,  A Valley Grows Up by Edward Osmond, 1953.

*Agriculture, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tt7x

Poems from the fields ...... John Clare and 19th century rural Northamptonshire ....... today on the wireless

My old friend David Bishop first introduced me to John Clare a almost a decade ago.

And so I was pleased the Radio 4 have rebroadcast this.*

"In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Northamptonshire poet John Clare who, according to one of Melvyn's guests Jonathan Bate, was 'the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced'. 

Clare worked in a tavern, as a gardener and as a farm labourer in the early 19th century and achieved his first literary success with Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. 

He was praised for his descriptions of rural England and his childhood there, and his reaction to the changes he saw in the Agricultural Revolution with its enclosures, displacement and altered, disrupted landscape. 

Despite poor mental health and, from middle age onwards, many years in asylums, John Clare continued to write and he is now seen as one of the great poets of his age.

With Sir Jonathan Bate, Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford, Mina Gorji
Senior Lecturer in the English Faculty and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Simon Kövesi, Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University

Producer: Simon Tillotson".*

Picture; Harrowing in Mustard on stubble from A Farmer’s Year, 1899


*John Clare, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08cstfr