Pages: 1  2  3

Mapperley Home and Farmyard

Mapperley is a very ancient town – it is named in the Doomsday Book, which was compiled in 1086. Andrew, Martha and family lived at the edge of town in a large red brick house with the farm buildings surrounding it. There were several coal mines in the area.

Mapperley Home

Mapperley Farmyard, Derbyshire, England

During a visit to the Mapperley Farm in 1981, I was able to visit at the house with the present owners, Mr. and Mrs. Glover. They invited Mr. Thornley and Mrs. Cook, both who had knowledge of the Cameron Family. The farm is now about 120 acres, and is a dairy farm. At present 50 acres has been expropriated for strip coal mining.

Mr. Thornley’s grandfather, Enoch, played with the Cameron boys. He would tell the story of how he had fallen off a donkey cart at the Cameron Farm and broken his arm when he was 12 years old. He went to school with the Cameron boys, and lived just down the street. Mrs. Cook came often to the Cameron house as a little girl, and remembered Andrew as being very tall with a ginger-tipped beard. There was an apple orchard and garden at the back of the house. They are now gone. The house is basically the same as it was when the Camerons lived in it. The farm is now a dairy farm and the present milk shed (beside the road) was a slaughter house and butcher shop.

Andrew Jr. remembers cutting his hand with a knife in that building while peeling a turnip (he showed me the scar). The countryside is rolling farmland. Andrew was a proud horseman and won prizes for his horses. The older children went to school here. Margaret and Agnes took piano lessons; it is likely that the other children did too. All of the children could play – The girls all played the piano, Bill and Andy could play the violin, and Hector could play most instruments. There were two pubs in town. The Black Horse was just down the street. Ruth Bailey (Roney) told me her mother, Marion said that she often had to run down to this pub for a quart of beer for her father. The Candlestick was further out of town – it got it’s name because they only had one candle; so when the jug of ale was empty, the patrons were left in the dark while the proprietor took the candle downstairs for more ale.

Pages: 1  2  3