Timeline

1. Stone Age before 2500 BC

   1. Thousands of years ago

      First traces: flint tools

      The oldest things found on Hill Farm are worked flints: tools shaped by hunters, gatherers and early farmers who used this valley long before anyone wrote about it. The light soils of the valley sides were easy to work, and the River Fynn, which would probably have been tidal here, brought water, fish and game. Elsewhere in the parish a Mesolithic axe was found on Playford Heath and a polished Neolithic axe has also been recorded, both in the Suffolk Historic Environment Record.

      Photographs and descriptions of the flint tools found on the farm will be added here.

2. Roman and Saxon AD 43 to 1066

   1. Roman Britain

      Roman pottery by the railway

      When the railway cutting was dug across the south side of the valley in the 1850s, the workmen turned up fragments of Roman urns. The Ordnance Survey marked the spot on its first detailed map: look for Fragments of Roman Urns found A.D. 1858 beside the line on the 1881 map.

   2. About AD 900 to 1000

      A Saxon seax near the old ford

      In 1883 Manfred Biddell, Arthur Biddell’s eldest son, gave the British Museum an Anglo-Saxon seax: a long, single-edged iron knife-sword, about 75 to 80 cm long, with a decorated back. It came from the river silts of the valley near the old ford, just over today’s parish boundary. The name Playford itself is usually explained as Old English for the ford where games were held. Crossing the Fynn has mattered here for more than a thousand years, which is why our new cattle ford (see 2023) feels like part of a long story.

   3. 1086

      Playford in Domesday Book

      When William the Conqueror’s commissioners recorded Playford in 1086, the manor was held from Robert Malet, one of the greatest Norman landholders in Suffolk. The entry reads like a farm inventory: plough teams, 20 acres of meadow, woodland enough to feed 20 pigs, a mill, cattle, pigs, sheep, beehives and a church. Meadow, grazing, woodland and bees are all still part of Hill Farm today.

3. Tudor and Stuart 1485 to 1714

   1. 1500s to 1719

      The Feltons of Playford Hall

      Early in the 1500s the manor passed by marriage to the Felton family, who built the moated Playford Hall across the river in about 1590. For two centuries Playford was a family estate run from the Hall, its land worked by tenants and labourers on the arable fields, the river meadows and the heath.

   2. From the 1500s

      Coins and musket balls

      Coins from Tudor times onwards have been found on the farm, small losses from people working, trading and travelling across these fields. So have lead musket balls of the 1600s. One idea is that they were dropped by Parliamentarian soldiers quartered at Playford Hall during the Civil War of the 1640s. Suffolk was firmly on Parliament’s side, and in January 1643 Parliament’s commissioner William Dowsing came to Playford church and broke down 17 ‘popish’ pictures. We have not yet found a written record of troops at the Hall, though. If you know of one, please tell us.

      Photographs of the coins and musket balls, with what each one is, will be added here.

4. Estate and enclosure 1719 to 1807

   1. 1719

      A tenanted estate

      When the last Felton died childless in 1719, Playford passed to his niece and her husband John Hervey, 1st Earl of Bristol, of Ickworth near Bury St Edmunds. The Herveys, later Marquesses of Bristol, owned almost the whole parish until 1951, and with no lord living at the Hall its land was let as tenanted farms. A survey of about 1770 shows how arable the parish already was: 432 of the 500 acres of neighbouring Lux Farm were ploughland, and many fields were still called walks, after the sheepwalks on the heath that farmers had recently broken up.

5. The Biddells 1808 to 1892

   1. 1808

      Arthur Biddell takes Hill Farm

      In 1808 Arthur Biddell, a 25-year-old farmer from West Suffolk, took the tenancy of Hill Farm; a lease of 1810 gives it as 221 acres at £265 a year. He went on to farm neighbouring Lux and Kiln Farms as well, served the parish for decades as churchwarden, surveyor of highways and overseer of the poor, and became a respected land and tithe valuer. His day books, wage books and work books, now in Suffolk Archives, are among the best records anywhere of how Suffolk was farmed in the early 1800s.

      

      

      

   2. 1815 to 1840s

      Made in Playford: Biddell's implements

      Biddell was an inventive farmer. His hay-borer, a giant corkscrew for letting the heat out of a haystack before it could catch fire, won a silver medal from the Society of Arts in 1822 and was made by William Wright, the village edge-tool maker. In the 1840s his scarifier, an iron-framed implement for breaking up hard ground, became one of the best sellers of Ransomes of Ipswich, the engineering firm founded by his father-in-law. In 1842 two of his sons fed and stoked Ransomes’ first self-propelled steam threshing machine at the Royal Show in Bristol.

      

      

   3. 1859

      The railway cuts the valley

      The East Suffolk line opened in June 1859. First planned to follow the river, it was moved halfway up the south side of the valley, slicing through the farmland. Level crossings let carts and stock reach the water meadows, but a bridge built to take hay wagons under the line gave way and was buried in the embankment, where it still lies. Over time the strip between the railway and the river became cut off and little used.

      

   4. 1860 to 1892

      Red Polls, Suffolk Punches and sheep

      Arthur’s youngest son Herman took over Hill Farm in 1860. Father and son built up a Red Poll herd of up to 100 cows, reckoned the finest in the county, and Herman compiled the first Suffolk Stud Book (1880), which traces Suffolk Punch pedigrees back to 1768. His brother Manfred at Lux Farm bred prize Suffolk horses, kept Southdown and horned Norfolk sheep, the two breeds behind today’s Suffolk sheep, and in 1856 started the Kesgrave Lamb Sales on Playford Heath, which drew more than 5,000 sheep a year. From the late 1860s the Playford Hall land north of the river was added to Hill Farm.

      

      

   5. 1870s to 1890s

      Hard times on the land

      From the 1870s cheap grain from the American prairies, carried by steamship, flooded into Britain. Wheat fell from about 59 shillings a quarter in 1873 to under 23 shillings by 1894, and much of the poorer heathland around the parish went back to sheepwalk. Herman Biddell gave up the farm in 1892 after 84 years of Biddells at Hill House.

6. Horses to tractors 1896 to 1946

   1. 1896 to 1946

      George Fiske: milk, beet and horses

      George Fiske, from a Bramford farming family, farmed Hill Farm for fifty years. Through the lean 1920s and 1930s a herd of about 30 cows, still milked by hand, supplied fresh milk to Ipswich, alongside beef cattle, around 30 sows, poultry and an orchard by the church. Sugar beet, grown with a government subsidy from 1924, went by rail from Bealings to the new Ipswich factory. Eighteen working horses and about fourteen men worked the farm, much as in Herman Biddell’s day, while the heaviest clay fields were left to scrub.

      

      

      

      

   2. 1914 to 1945

      Two world wars

      In both wars the farm lost young men and horses and was asked to grow more food. By 1939 Fiske’s team was elderly, with his horsemen in their sixties. The farm’s first tractor, a Fordson, arrived early in the Second World War, grassland was ploughed for grain, and later German prisoners of war came over daily from Debach to help.

7. The modern farm 1946 to 2017

   1. 1946

      Charles Lofts and the new farming

      Charles Lofts was 21 when he took the 385-acre tenancy in 1946, with no money behind him and boundless energy. The first fields were cut by combine harvester in 1947, the last horses had gone by 1949, and an Ayrshire, later Friesian, dairy herd grew to 83 cows. When the Bristol estate was sold after the 4th Marquess died in 1951, he bought the farm, with Hill House and 16 cottages, in 1953. Buying the land between the railway and the river in 1959 let him irrigate crops from the Fynn.

      

   2. 1955 to 1990s

      Hedges out, ploughs in

      The post-war drive for production changed the landscape. By 1955 nearly all the farm’s hedges had gone and scores of old oaks were felled. In 1964 the dairy herd gave way to suckler cows on the water meadows, and after Britain joined the Common Market in 1973 almost every meadow in the parish was ploughed for crops. The water meadows still part of Hill Farm seem largely to have escaped: aerial photographs show them under grass in 1945 and again in 2000, and long-term residents don’t recall them being ploughed in the last 60 years. A blurry image from 1985 hints that part may briefly have grown crops, and they may have been ploughed during or just after the war. Set-aside in the 1990s began to put some of the parish’s arable land back to grass.

      

   3. 1995 to 2017

      Grass and wetland

      When Charles Lofts retired in 1995 he sold the arable land and kept 119 acres around the house, mostly long-standing grass on the valley floor. He extended The Mere for wildlife; it is now recognised for its ecological significance as a County Wildlife Site. He died at Hill House in 2017, aged 91, after 70 years there.

8. Today and tomorrow 2020 onwards

   1. Today

      Hill Farm today

      Hill Farm is now an 80-acre agroecological project in the Fynn Valley and home to several enterprises: a market garden, dye flowers, a grazing beef herd, honeybees, small-batch preserves and ecological monitoring. Cattle graze the valley meadows again, and bees forage where Domesday Book recorded beehives more than nine centuries ago.

   2. 2023

      A new ford for a cleaner river

      Working with the Essex & Suffolk Rivers Trust, we built a ford so that our cattle cross the River Fynn in one place. The old, eroded crossing point was restored with willow revetments, giving a faster-flowing main channel beside shallow, still water for wildlife. The ford reduces the sediment and nutrients washing into the river, and the old crossing has since grown back well.

      

      

      

      

   3. Next

      The next chapter

      Every generation has farmed this land in the way its times demanded, and each left its mark on the maps. Ours will be no different, so we intend to record it. This map will gain layers showing what we measure today, such as vegetation surveys, soil health and the birdsong picked up by our sound recorders, so that people in future can see how the land changed while it was in our care.