Wallwork Family Pages

hollyhock flower Welcome to these pages. You won't find a daily blog, heaps of downloads, or requests for donations, but we hope you enjoy looking through this box of hand-crafted oddments.

We live in a house which originally comprised three small farm labourers' cottages. A date on a brick in the chimney suggests that it was built in 1839. At one time, these cottages, along with the farmhouse next door, another larger cottage on the other side and a pair of oasthouses formed a small hamlet surrounded by fields. A small building still exists behind our house which housed the bakehouse and laundry for the farm and a later extension housed a couple of outside toilets. Whilst most of the fields have gone, a few remain beyond our back garden. The original cottages probably had very little if any area of garden at the back, but there is now garden space for lawn and flowerbeds, a fruit and vegetable patch and an area for children to play at the far end. This section is also a habitat for a range of wildlife. You'll find details of some of this on our Down the Garden page. Some of the more interesting oddments we have unearthed in the garden are on the Under the garden page

The original farm labourers' cottages were obviously built relatively cheaply. Although the construction techniques were those traditional in this part of Kent (solid brick walls downstairs with a timber-framed upper storey which was tile-hung at the front and weatherboarded at the back), some of the timbers and boards used were thinner than usual. We understand that the cottages fell into dilapidation in the 1940s or 50s and that they may even have been due for demolition before being reinstated and converted into a single dwelling by knocking various doorways through the dividing walls. The damage from rot and woodworm in the past, and repeated bodges by workmen over the years, means that we have had to do a lot of work to get the house to a decent standard (i.e. with half-decent insulation, almost level floors and safe electrical wiring). This work led to the discovery of a range of objects under the floorboards. Some of these probably fell through gaps between boards when the cottages were still occupied, others were probably swept into holes in the floor before boards were replaced at the time when the cottages were combined into the one present dwelling. Take a look at the Under the Floorboards page to see some of this history.

Both Chris and Kathy have spent time researching their family genealogies. Kathy's researches started from scratch, but Chris has built on much research done by his father. Our genealogy pages include family tree information on the Wallwork, Sales, Ormondroyd, Lindsey, Coppock, Collier and Bennison families. Visit our ancestors here.

A few irrelevant snippets and oddments appear on our Factoids page. Not important, nor even thrilling, but possibly of interest.

Is it still fashionable to include a set of links on your web pages? Oh well, never mind - some sites are so useful, cool, or weird that we just couldn't resist it.

The What's New page provides details of updates, a simple way to see whether it may be worth looking again at pages you've visited before.

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