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Last
modified:
August 29, 2006
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Up at the farm, Dick and Laura ‘Watson were now the
tenants and today a villager, Joe Brown still remembers going there to help with
the threshing once a fortnight. The water mill drove the threshing machine,
which separated the oats from the stalks.
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Dick Watson
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The spring that came down the hillside and worked the water wheel never
dried up, but kept the sluice full of water. In the 1950’s a skull was
found at the base of this wheel and the police had to investigate, but
foul play was not
suspected.
Doreen
Watson was born at Tottergill. In 1934 aged just 13, she kept a daily diary
which tells how she worked and played in those carefree days, when much was
expected of country children, but when they also enjoyed a degree of freedom and
responsibility denied the children of today.
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The
abundance of local produce is apparent from her accounts of helping with jam
making from gooseberries. raspberries, crab apples, plums, strawberries and
rhubarb. She took orders for chestnuts along with collecting the eggs daily and
then helped her mother to sell them with their home-made butter in Brampton
market.
With Jess. her much loved pony, she travelled about the
farm, sometimes in a little cart, delivering picnic lunches to the harvest
fields or leading hay back to the barn for stacking. sometimes riding over the
fells to check on the sheep or going down to the blacksmith’s in the village.
Doreen’s
mother Laura, had all the duties of a farmer’s wife and was also a
postmistress down in the village and had helped with the reading and writing of
letters for the Navvies working on the reservoir in the fields below. She ran a
bed and breakfast business and provided farm holidays for families, maintaining
a tradition of hospitality, which continues today.
Despite
the fact that daily life was hard and demanding and the financial rewards meagre
at best, in later years the family was to remember these times as ‘halcyon
days on the hill’.
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