Ram Hall is one of Oldnall End’s most striking properties. Its Grade II* listing dates it to the 16th century, and we have circumstantial evidence of its ownership from the mid-17th century until 1770, when it came into the ownership of the Berkswell Estate. Since 1989 Ram Hall has been known internationally for its Berkswell Cheese, crafted by the Fletcher family from the milk of the farm’s 800-strong flock of sheep.

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Ram Hall before 1770

In March 1694, the wealthy Berkswell yeoman John Whitehead wrote his will.¹ He left a great deal of property and dozens of bequests, but at the top of the list was his own house, which he left first to his wife Katherine, and then to his niece Elizabeth Burnell and her daughter Mary. John described his home as:

My messuage cottage or tenement and land in Oldnall End in Barkswell, in the actuall possession of me the said John Whitehead, which I heretofore (together with other lands) bought of and from John Seyliard & Mary his wife, William Roberts Esq. & Elizabeth his wife, Knightley Purefoy Esq., Richard Franklyn Barronett, William Purefoy Esq., Anthony Sambach & Robert Child, Gent., called or known by the name of Harpers Pieces being nine Closes and Hoo Meadows & in Oldnall End aforesaid.

The people from whom John bought his property were a family group, the heirs of George Purefoy and his wife Jane Glover, and the purchase must have taken place between 1645, when John Seyliard married Mary Glover, and 1667, when Seyliard died.² While we cannot yet find evidence for the Purefoy-Glover connection with Berkswell, we can identify the fields John mentions on the Berkswell Tithe Apportionment in 1839.³

The Ram Hall farmlands (as of 1839) are outlined in pink on the map below. Harpers Piece (marked in orange) lies directly behind Ram Hall. John referred in his will to ‘Harpers Pieces’ and it may be that the name once applied to more than just the single field that bore the name in 1839. The Hoo Meadows (also marked in orange) were directly to the south of the 1839 estate. They had been sold off by 1802, when the Berkswell Enclosure Map shows everything to the SW of the 1839 estate in separate ownership.

John Whitehead died in 1701 and his widow Katherine in 1711. The probate inventories taken of their respective possessions show a house whose layout broadly corresponds to Ram Hall, with a Hall, Parlour, Kitchen, pantry and utilities (dairy, brewhouse, cheese chamber) downstairs, and five upstairs ‘chambers’ over (the same layout would be recorded in sales particulars more than 180 years later).⁴ Unusually for the time, the Whiteheads did not use their downstairs rooms for sleeping; all of their seven beds were located in upstairs rooms. We might guess that their bedroom was the chamber over the kitchen, which had several touches of luxury not found in other rooms, including two featherbeds (reduced to one in Katherine’s inventory), a bedscreen, and a ‘hanging press’ (an early wardrobe).

On Katherine’s death, the house went to her husband’s great-niece Mary Burnell, who was also one of Katherine’s executors. We currently have no documentary evidence for the period between 1711 and 1770, but circumstantial evidence, including field names, internal layout, and Mary’s connection with the next documented owner allows us to conclude that the Whiteheads’ home was indeed Ram Hall.

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Ram Hall after 1770

In June 1770, a ‘very compact freehold estate’ in Berkswell was advertised for sale, ‘subject to the Estate for Life of Mrs Katherine Atterbury, aged 73 Years, and to a Lease to the present Tenant, Mr John Parker, six Years in which were unexpired at Lady-Day last’.⁵ It was described as:

consisting of a large and commodious Farm House, with a Malthouse, other convenient Out-buildings, a Yard, and a large Orchard and Garden (well planted) adjoining thereto, and upwards of 77 Acres of old inclosed Arable, Meadow, and Pasture Land, lying round the same. The … Premises are in exceeding good Repair and Condition, have some old and a large Quantity of thriving young Timber now growing thereon, and are situate within five Miles of Coventry.

Land Tax records confirm that ‘Mrs Atterbury’ was the owner and John Parker the tenant of Ram Hall between 1773 and 1783. Katherine Atterbury was born Katherine Burnell in Warwick in 1699. She was the younger sister of Mary Burnell, who inherited Ram Hall on Katherine Whitehead’s death in 1711 and it seems likely she inherited the house from her sister.⁶ The Whitehead-Burnell-Atterbury connection allows us to say with some confidence that the Whitehead’s home, purchased at some point between 1645 and 1667, was indeed Ram Hall.

The Parker-Garner Family (1770-1880)

Katherine Atterbury’s tenant John Parker and his wife Lucy married at Berkswell in 1761 and it is not inconceivable that this is when they took over Ram Hall.⁷ They evidently had a close relationship with their landlady; when their eldest daughter was born in 1762, they named her Katherine in their landlady’s honour, and when Katherine Parker married Samuel Garner at Berkswell in 1785, Katherine Atterbury was one of the witnesses.⁸ She died at her home in Kenilworth two months later at the age of 86.⁹

Katherine’s life interest in the property now came to an end, and the purchaser in 1770, Sir John Eardley Wilmot, took full ownership.¹⁰ Through the Wilmot connection, Ram Hall became part of the Berkswell Estate. At the same time, Samuel and Katherine Garner took over the lease from Katherine’s parents. They had two children: Penelope, who married William Reader and moved to farm at Meeting House Lane, and Samuel (II).

In December 1818, Samuel (II) married Elizabeth Thompson, part of the large local family specialising in timber and carpentry, who had grown up down the road at the Moat House.¹¹ When Samuel senior died in 1820, Samuel (II) and Elizabeth took over the farm.¹² The 1851 and 1861 censuses record Samuel as a ‘farmer of 78 acres,’ suggesting that the estate was largely unchanged since the 1770 sale. Elizabeth died in 1869 and Samuel (II) in 1870, and the farm passed to their eldest son, Benjamin Garner, the fourth generation of the family to farm the land.

The 1871 census records Benjamin, a 52-year-old bachelor with his housekeeper Elizabeth Renshaw, nee Rawlins, who had grown up at the George in the Tree inn on the Kenilworth Road. They married two years later.¹³ Benjamin and Elizabeth kept the farm on for another seven years, but in November 1880 they sold up and moved to Kenilworth.¹⁴

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The Fletcher Family, 1881-2023

Ram Hall’s new tenants were Thomas and Frances Fletcher from just across the parish boundary in Balsall, who had previously farmed at Hob Lane. They regularly rented out three of the farmhouse’s bedrooms to commuters, highlighting the ‘very large’ rooms and access to sitting room, kitchen and pantry.¹⁵

When the owner of the Berkswell Estate, Thomas Walker, died in 1888, the whole estate came up for sale. Ram Hall was advertised as part of Lot 1 (the Hall and 12 farms); the catalogue describes it as partly stone built with tiled roof, 2 parlours, kitchen, dairy, larder, brew house, cellar and five bedrooms (the same layout as the Whitehead inventories 180 years earlier), noting also that it contains an antique Mantel Piece and Staircase.¹⁶ The whole of Lot 1 was bought by Joshua Hirst Wheatley, who became the new lord of Berkswell Manor.

In 1989, Ram Hall came to national and international notice when the 5th generation of Fletchers developed Berkswell Cheese, a hard sheep’s cheese made entirely from the farm’s own milk. Berkswell, which gets its unusual shape from being moulded in a plastic colander, quickly became a firm favourite with gourmands all over the world (read about La Fromagerie’s visit to the farm here). In autumn 2023, the family announced that due to economic pressures, they would end production and leave the farm after more than 140 years.¹⁷ At time of writing, the farm’s future remains in question.

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Notes

1. Will of John Whitehead. 8 Mar. 1694. Probate Lichfield, 13 September 1701. ↩︎
2. The Glovers were from Willesden in Middlesex and the Purefoys from the Oxon/Berks border, although George (I) Purefoy held property in Hartshill, Warwickshire at the time of his death in 1628. The heirs named are the two surviving daughters of George’s wife Jane by her first marriage to Sir Thomas Glover, together with their husbands (Seylliard, Roberts); the children / children in law of the third daughter by her marriage to George (II) Purefoy (Purefoy, Sambach); George (I)’s nephew (Franklyn) and the family lawyer (Child). There may be a connection to the Coventry / Warwickshire branch of the Purefoy family; the William Purefoy named by Whitehead, married to George (II) and Ann Glover’s daughter Dorothy, was the nephew and heir of the Coventry MP, famous Puritan and signatory of Charles I’s death warrant William Purefoy (1580-1659). ↩︎
3. This is, of course, on the assumption that the names had not changed between 1694 and 1839, although the proximity of these fields to Ram Hall would tend to support the connection. No other fields of those names appear on the 1839 map. ↩︎
4. Probate Inventories: John Whitehead, 7 June 1701 (probate Lichfield, 13 September 1701); Katherine Whitehead, 19 February 1711 (probate Coleshill, 16 April 1711). ↩︎
5. ‘To be SOLD to the best Bidder,’ Coventry Standard, 4 Jun. 1770: 3 ↩︎
6. I can’t find any trace of Mary Burnell after 1711, but she may have been dead by 1737 when her two sisters are mentioned in their cousin’s will, but she is not. She was almost certainly dead by 1764, when her sister Elizabeth mentions only one surviving sibling, Catherine, in her will. ↩︎
7. Marriage. St John’s Berkswell. 15 March 1761. John Parker of Welsborn [sic] and Lucy Blackford of Berkswell. ↩︎
8. Marriage. St John’s Berkswell. 3 February 1785. Samuel Garner and Catherine [sic] Parker. ↩︎
9. Burial. St Nicholas Kenilworth. 12 April 1785. Catherine Atterbury, widow. ↩︎
10. 18 Apr. 1776. Lease for a year from Sir John Eardley Wilmot of Great Ormond St … to Sir Hew Dalrymple of N Berwick and Sir Sampson Gideon of Belvedere Kent … viz, a messuage in Berkswell, now or late of John Parker, to which Wilmot was expectant to the remainder on the death of Catherine Atterbury, widow. Warwick Archives CR2440/6/7. ↩︎
11. Marriage. St John’s Berkswell. 30 December 1818. Samuel Garner and Elizabeth Thompson. ↩︎
12. Burials. St John’s Berkswell. 11 March 1820. Samuel Garner of Ram Hall, farmer, age 68. ↩︎
13. Marriage. St John’s Berkswell. 20 November 1873. Benjamin Garner and Elizabeth Renshaw. ↩︎
14. ‘Ram Hall, Berkswell,’ Coventry Times, 10 November 1880: 4. ↩︎
15. e.g. Coventry Herald, 3 Aug. 1883: 2; Birmingham Daily Post, 12 Mar. 1888: 3. ↩︎
16. Sale of the Berkswell Estate. August 1888. Warwick Archives CR1709/552/1-2. ↩︎
17. Patrick McGuigan. ‘Berkswell production ceased as Ram Hall and its herd move on.’ Guild of Fine Food. 1 Oct. 2023. ↩︎