Meadowcroft Farm, formerly Town Farm, and the original Town Farm now Meadowcroft Cottage.
By Sue Miller
Like most other Orwell farms, Meadowcroft Farm exists in name only in 2012. Its timber barns were converted for residential use in 1990 when its 198 acres were sold and divided between two local farmers. Do not confuse this ‘Town Farm’ with ‘Town Green Farm,’ which is behind the village shop on Town Green Road.
Town Farm
In 1910 this freehold farm comprised a compact block of approximately 100 acres, stretching from Back Street (Lotfield Street) to Lunway (Malton Road). It was then known as Town Farm and was owned and run from 1910 to 1946 by Mrs Ellen Roads, widow of farmer Harper Roads, with help from two family members, plus eight hired men at threshing time. Government records show that during the Second World War Mrs Roads was making only a modest income, growing mainly wheat and keeping five cattle, five horses, fifty hens, twenty ducks and one pig.
She lived in the yellow brick Victorian farmhouse, while the original 17th century timber framed farm house, now known as Meadowcroft Cottage, served as a ‘tied cottage’ to house farm workers.
Meadowcroft Farm
By 1946 the elderly Mrs Roads had moved away from Orwell and Town Farm, renamed Meadowcroft Farm, was sold to Henry Parcell of the adjacent Duke of Wellington public house who already farmed some of the County Council smallholding land on Barrington Road, and was also a coal merchant.
In the early 1950s the District Council made a compulsory purchase of eight acres of his land for the construction of Meadowcroft Way housing estate. Henry was known locally as a hard worker and a good farmer, but he retired in 1973 and sold the farm to Douglas Adamson. Mr Adamson, a retired air force officer, farmed Meadowcroft for seventeen years, commuting between Orwell and a larger farm that he owned in the Fens. He grew only barley and wheat at Meadowcroft, employing just one farm worker, and found that farming was very profitable in the 1960s and 70s. However, by 1988 when he was chairman of the Cambridgeshire branch of the NFU the future was beginning to look bleak for farming. “Farming was becoming totally bureaucratically controlled. Europe was over-producing. The British climate often made it impossible for our farmers to produce crops of the quality demanded by the supermarkets that now had control of most of the nation’s food. Grain prices were going through the floor, and I was glad to get out of farming.”
Mr Adamson retired in 1990 and the farmhouse, barns and land were sold in four separate lots, 97.11 acres being purchased by the Breed family of Lilac Farm and 43.51 acres by David Pearce of Home Farm, Arrington. The farm barns were converted to residential use (see photos.)
