Citylife in Rugeley & Cannock Chase - Nov/Dec 2023

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A Lost Agricultural Scene By Harry Thornton (c2005) When the Reverend Cason wrote in the Brereton Parish Magazine of November 1959 “More and more this area in which we live becomes urban and not rural; day by day the industrial engulfs the agricultural” he was seeing the view from the vicarage over the Trent Valley change dramatically as tall new structures at Lea Hall Colliery and the ‘A’ Power Station relentlessly took over from centuries old farmland. Whilst the colliery gobbled up all of Lea Hall Farm’s land beyond the canal, other nearby farms also disappeared. The Moors Farm which lay over the Mossley canal bridge, but was more accessible from Rugeley’s Love Lane and Leather Mill Lane (via its one-time south-easterly arm), was given over in the 1950s by its last farmer, Mr Walker, partly for Lea Hall Colliery use and partly for building the later ‘B’ Power Station – the farm buildings stood between the present station entrance and the cooling towers. In the early 1940s a large field immediately to the west of farm buildings had been almost entirely quarried for ‘valley gravel’ for building Hixon’s wartime airfield. Ten years later, material for making the Lea Hall Colliery railway embankments was dug out from near the farm creating two large “borrow pits.” The pits filled with water and one became an unofficial local swimming pool until a boy drowned there in 1959. Afterwards they were filled in by the tipping of colliery waste which engulfed a large area of the former farmland. A six acre field now crossed diagonally by the Power Station railway embankment and lying partly under the coal stocking area had been purchased, with £1,000, and given to Trustees in 1828 by the charitable Miss Sarah Hopkins for an income to provide “additional Lectures and Sermons” in Rugeley church on Sunday afternoons “except on those days on which the Sacrament is administered” – the trust apparently still exists with a bank account. The same field will be crossed diagonally in another direction when the planned Rugeley bypass is completed. Boothurst Farm has also entirely disappeared. The now demolished ‘A’ Power Station cooling towers rose up around where the farmhouse and buildings one stood. After being farmed by the Pickerill family since the 1920s, Mr Joe Pickerill reluctantly left in June 1954 with his prize-winning ‘Boothurst Friesians’ attested herd, built up over 12 years, to take another farm at Hopton. When he died two years later, to be buried with his wife at Armitage, his herd was dispersed and a prize bull fetched an exceptional 475 guineas (£499). Mr Pickerill, of portly build, was ahead of his time for treating the cows to music in their sheds with the aim of increasing milk yield. With a son named Philip (Pip), he was especially known in Rugeley for his greengrocery shop in Bow Street – his Trentside land being well suited to growing vegetables. Some of the Boothurst land has stayed green in the Trent flood plain, and around the Power Stations Social Club which occupies part of what was the long boomerang shaped strip of access land called Langley Common. Footpaths once allowed walkers to cross fields and stiles from Mossley to pass near the Moors Farm then on to near Boothurst Farm and Langley Common to Holly Bank Farm then along Holly Bank Lane to the Armitage Road near Hawksyard. Holly Bank Farm also fell victim to the Power Station. *The late Harry Thornton was a member of the Landor (local history) Society. 28
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Citylife in Rugeley & Cannock Chase - Nov/Dec 2023

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