Monument record 5993/1 - Ashton Wold Farm

{2} Northamptonshire (63 examples recorded to date, gazetteer in NMR, Swindon).
Northamptonshire was a county dominated by large estates. Nearly a third of the area was in estates of over 10,000 acres and there were 38 owners of more than 3,000 acres in 1871. However, according to Caird, ‘many of them have no interest in their farms beyond the annual rent they receive, know nothing of the management of land themselves and do not employ an agent who does.’ As a result ‘their tenants, from deficient buildings and want of drainage are incapacitated from doing justice to their farms’. There were of course exceptions to this general picture. The Spencers of Althorpe were well known for their interest in improvements, the third Earl Spencer being the first President of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. The Duke of Grafton was also influential, and in the 1830s erected well-planned sets of buildings on several of his farms. G.A.Dean was responsible for a set of buildings at Milton in the 1850s. The layout provided four open yards and one long bullock shed for tying stock. His book influenced the layout of Warren Farm, Aynho, built in 1848-52 for the Cartwright estate and dominated by its tall chimney.
A charming and unusual example of a ‘ferme ornee’, not built until the beginning of the C20th survives at Ashton Wold. It is in local vernacular style on a miniature scale and contains a dairy and cow stalls, stable, and poultry house around a small yard beside a pond.
As farming moved into the C20th conditions did not improve and landed estates continued to be sold. The loss of sons of the landed families in WWI, coupled with Lloyd George’s tax reforms and their affects on the gentry, accelerated this trend. The temporary improvement in agricultural prices brought about by the wartime demands encouraged further sales and the Estates Gazette estimated that a quarter of the land of England changed hands between 1917 and 1921. Not only was this exchange of land on a far larger scale than at any time since the Dissolution of the Monasteries, it was of a different type. Farms were often bought on an individual basis to their sitting tenants, who did not have the money to build extravagantly. The era of the Model Farm was over. Occasionally there was a wealthy owner, such as Lord Rothschild at Ashton Wold, who could afford to build a ‘ferme ornee’ for his own amusement, but these are rare. Such places have great architectural charm, but are looking back to a rural idyll rather than initiating new farming techniques. As such they have little relevance to the farming story and show a final break with the link between beauty and utility which was at the heart of the Enlightenment and the philosophy of the early ‘improvers’.

{3} The entire parish of Ashton was bought in 1860 by Baron Rothschild, and in c.1900 his son Charles transformed the village into a notable essay in the picturesque. Ashton Wold Farm, an early C19th house in the east of the parish was rebuilt as a model farm, and a large house, Ashton Wold, was built nearby.

<1> Bond A., 1995, Thematic Survey of Planned and Model Farms: Northamptonshire, (unchecked) (Gazetteer). SNN63075.

<2> Wade Martins S., 2002, The English Model Farm: Building the Agricultural Ideal, 1700 -1914, p.193-4+216 (part checked) (Book). SNN102219.

<3> Royal Commission on The Historical Monuments of England, 1984, An Inventory of The Historical Monuments in The County of Northampton, p.16-18 (unchecked) (Series). SNN77384.

<4> Clarke S., 2011, Home Farm, Ashton Wold, Northamptonshire: Historic Building Record, (checked) (Report). SNN107526.

<5> Walker, C., 2011, Archaeological Desk-Based Assessment of Land at Ashton Wold House, Oundle, Northamptonshire, (checked) (Report). SNN107607.

Record last edited

Oct 17 2019 1:54PM