The History Of Higher Oak Farm
Our Family and farm
Our family has been involved in farming for well over 100 years. In the late 1800’s and early 20th Century Kirk’s great grandfather farmed High Gill Farm in Lancashire and his mum was born at the farm in the 1920’s. The original farm was lost when his grandfather broke his back and could no longer work the farm.
Alma and Jack Robertson with their hens circa 1946.
Although Kirk’s parents are no longer with us they left us with a love of farming and a love of animals in our DNA. Our family, wherever we were in the world, always had chickens and dogs.
Our journey started with keeping chickens in our back garden. We loved the constant supply of eggs and it was amazing for our three girls to grow up around the hens! We bought the fields on Higher Lane back in 2013 with the idea that we’d create a smallholding and the hope that we’d be able to become more self-sufficient as a family.
We started off with our rare breed hens. We knew that we wanted to do something different than other poultry farms and help out some breeds that are almost extinct! As we’ve grown, we’ve introduced our hybrid hens for great egg production. Our eggs are on their way to becoming Organic!
The house where we currently live is an old farmhouse from 1700’s which used to be called Oak Farm. When we had the opportunity to buy some farming land in 2013 on the outskirts of our village we jumped at the chance and so Higher Oak Farm was born. It is named after our original family farm High Gill and our current farm house’s original name Oak Farm. As the land is at the top of a hill in Lymm from where we live it seemed only appropriate to call it Higher Oak Farm. So a brand new farm was born from a long held dream out of a couple of fields at the top of Lymm. We all thought it was a perfect name for a beautiful place.
The boundary of the site at Higher Oak Farm has remained the same since long before the 1st Edition OS map. The map shows a number of smaller fields within the present land holding, all of which have since disappeared, probably around the time of WW1.
A more recent hedge, running north-south now cuts the field in two but links to the northern boundary via a short length of older hedge.
Land to the west of the site belonged to Crouchley Farm, part of the Crouchley Hall estate and it appears that many of the hedges to the west, excluding the western boundary of the site were the subject of a C19th reorganisation, (probably in 1848, when Lymm Hall Estate sold much of its land to the south and east), where some hedges were removed and other replanted to produce larger and more regular fields. To the east of the site, fields around Wildersmoor Farm were much smaller, implying that the enclosures were earlier than those around Crouchley Farm.
Within the farm, the relatively long straight hedge down the centre of the site was probably planted as part of the Crouchley Farm enclosure, as it has all the hallmarks of the other hedges further west, in that there are few hedgerow trees.
The exception hedge is the western boundary of the site, which has many fine established oak trees along it. The southern and eastern boundary hedges also support several large established oak trees along them.
To the north of the site, east of the long north-south hedge and just east of the site entrance from Higher Lane is a short section of double hedge, separated by a narrow strip of land of perhaps 10 – 12m. wide. This was part of an area zoned for highway widening to the south of Higher Lane, but subsequently abandoned after a new hedge was planted to the south of the intended route.