Antiquities

In 1965 the area that was once the manor of Yardley is almost entirely developed. The still largely rural landscape that existed ten years after Yardley had become part of Birmingham in 1911 has been transformed, and though open spaces remain they are almost without exception in restricted use as parks, playing fields, and allotments. The old pattern of lanes survives nearly everywhere, but the roads themselves, though in a very variable state of reconstruction due to the interruption of the war and post-war cost, are rarely in their rural state: between them large estates of private and municipal housing, and factory areas have been built. Farms and cottages, barns and watermills, have no place in city suburbs, and few buildings more than a century old are left: the survivors dwindle every year.

 

Vanished antiquities

1. Moated Sites, There have certainly been 8 of these, perhaps 11, in Yardley. But this is unlikely to have been the grand total, for doubtless many of the known early settlement sites had moats which were filled with rubbish or contracted to farm ponds before antiquarians became interested in recording water defences. All the known Yardley moats have been infilled this century. They were at Glebe Farm, a double moat east of Yardley Church, on Moat Lane, on Coventry Road west of Steyning Road, south of Tyseley Farm, extensive moats about Hyron and Broom Halls, and on Highfield Road near Painswick Road. The possible ones were 'the Moats' below Brigfield Crescent on Yardley Wood Road, and two sites on the eastern bound, where Broomhall Brook crosses Gospel Lane and just south of Warwick Road. All the moats were dug in Keuper Marl, which retains water, and were fed by a stream or directly by a spring from the drift capping nearby.

 

The only other earthworks known are 'Clay Walls' near Langley Hall, and an 11-acre site at Swanshurst: even the site of the latter, which was ploughed out in the 1820s, is not certain, and no guess can be made about its date or purpose.

2. Ancient Buildings. The former dwellings within the moats have all gone. 'Allestrey Hall' near St.Edburgha's Church, was demolished about 1700, Glebe Farm c.1934, Hyron Hall c.1927 and Broom Hall c.1950. The last three were all rebuildings, of the late 18th or early 19th centuries. Nothing is known of buildings on the other sites, all having disappeared at dates before detailed maps were produced.

 

 

The oldest buildings to survive into this century, but now gone, were probably Swanshurst, home of the Dolphins 15 - 19th centuries, a 15th century Hall with a half-timbered wing of 1600 and a brick one added in the later 1700s, demolished 1917: Hall Green Hall 16th century, with one brick wing and alterations of later date, home of Marstons and Severnes; demolished 1936: Shaftmoor, 16th century, timbered and plastered, where lived Greswolds and Steedmans, demolished c.1929 : Vintage Cottage 16th century and later - demolished 1964: Grove Farm 1651, half-timbered and later bricked in, enlarged 1815, Greswolds and Izods, demolished 1896: Field Gate Farm, 16th century and later: Ashleigh Grange 16th century, half-timbered Hall, demolished between the wars: Stockfield Farm 17th century, half-timbered, demolished c.1925. Buildings which disappeared earlier were Greetville (site unknown), Bulley Hall, and Greet Manor House: the last two were replaced by farms called Billesley Hall and Manor Farm, which have also gone.

 

The four windmills of Yardley had been razed by the mid-19th century. Of the watermills, eight in number, Lower Greet (Tyseley Brook) was first to go, in the 18th century, and the others, except Sarehole, have all been demolished since then: Lady Mill (soon after 1834), Greet (1855), Hay Mill (1865), Broomhall (1870?), Wash Mill and Titterford (1926 fire, 1936).

 

Many buildings were replaced by brick structures in the 18th and 19th centuries. More than 60 farms and many cottages have been razed since 1900, and other demolitions have included Hall Green School, Hiron, Fox Hollies, and Broom Halls, Cateswell, Tyseley Grange, the Workhouse, Gilbertstone and Acocks Green House, Lea Hall, Paradise, Coldbath Cottage, Stechford station, and Stockfield Hall.

 

Surviving antiquities

1. Buildings. The oldest buildings left in Yardley are St.Edburgha's Church 13 - 15th centuries: the Trust School alongside, 15th century and later; Hay Hall, a 15th century hall with a 16th century solar wing, brick-encased, and a gabled SW front after 1810;; and Blakesley Hall, 16th C half-timbered with brick-encased ground floor. Dating probably from the 17th C, but with an elegant Georgian casing on three sides is Pinfold (Mansfield) House. Marston Chapel (Church of the Ascension) was built by 1704, and enlarged in the late 1850s.

 

Surviving 18th century farms are Yardley, Hillhouse, Moorlands, Colehall. Other buildings of the period are Sarehole Mill, the former Taylor Memorial Home, and cottages in Yardley village, Yardley Road, Amington Road, Arden Road, Sparkhill, Showell Green, Paradise Lane and Prince of Wales Lane. Buildings of the early and middle 19th century are Acocks Green Station, the Bull's Head,  Christ Church, and Robin Hood.

 

2. Other Antiquities. Parts of the ancient open fields of Yardley remain undeveloped as recreation grounds : these are Church Field, Stich Meadow, in Manor Road R. G., Stichford Field beside Yardley Fields Road, and a small part of Stockfield in Wynford Road Recreation Ground.

 

The Coldbath (before 1750) and Swanshurst (before 1759) fishpools, and Titterford millpool, survive as amenities. Titterford head and tail races, the start of Sarehole head race and the dam of Old Pool on Coldbath Brook, and the side race of Hay Mill, can still be seen. The Warwick Canal (1793-9) was widened in 1929 and afterwards, as the Grand Union, and all its humped bridges have been replaced except that on Woodcock Lane North. On the Stratford Canal (c.1795 in Yardley) only High Bridge on School Road remains. Other old bridges are New Bridge before 1813 and Four Arches c.1822.

 

Watermills and windmills

For four miles the River Cole flows through Yardley, and for more than six miles north-eastward from Spark Brook it forms the boundary. Its tributaries above and in Yardley are few and small, and the river is only seven miles from its source when it enters the manor. Thus it is a minor stream, whose quick-rising floods soon subside, and it can never have been much more, though it would have been larger and less variable when there were bordering forests which retained water and released it steadily, and when the untapped water-table was overflowing copiously. The gradient was small, and the valley wide, so that watermill dams would necessarily be major undertakings: this may be a partial explanation of the absence of mills on the Cole when the Domesday Survey was made. However, since the 11th century, there have been 5 mills on the river and 3 on tributaries, but not all in existence at any one time. There have also been 5 mills just outside the manor, which may well have served it - notably Stichford Mill, for the whole of Church End had only one, Wash Mill, and perhaps a windmill near Lea Hall.

 

First documentary references are probably unreliable as indications of age unless it is clearly stated that the mill is then new. Greet Mill is named in 1275, twenty-six years after Stichford. In 1385, 'Wodemyll' was built: geology suggests that this might be Wash Mill, because that structure was in the drift-free clay region, which probably had the densest forest cover. Greethurst Mill appears first in 1437, and this was probably on or above the site of Lady Mill. Sarehole Mill was in existence at this time, since it was making payments to Maxstoke Priory, which closed at the Dissolution. The Boundary Presentment refers to Hay Mill in 1495. On Beighton's map of 1725 is shown what is provisionally called Lower Greet Mill: this is evidently not a confusion with Greet or Hay Mill since both are shown. Broomhall Mill is not heard of before 1778, though that does not prove it to be a late arrival like Titterford, which was advertised as new in 1783. Of all these mills only Sarehole survives.

 

Greet Mill was presumably associated with the manor house of Greet, 600 yards downstream. (Lower Greet Mill was nearer, but there is no evidence of its existence in mediaeval times, or indeed any information about it at all: its site, at the junction of the Cole and Tyseley Brook, has disappeared beneath industrial spoil). Greet Mill dam was placed above a small natural change of slope, thus creating a good fall: there was normally a shallows below the dam, and this became the Stratford Road ford, which claimed a number of victims in flood-time. Greet began as a corn mill, as did all of them in Yardley, was re-built in 1775, and by the century's end had been converted to blade-grinding. Out of use by 1843, it was demolished 12 years later. The weir across the river became ruinous, the pool drained, and the water flowed down the mill-race. In 1914 the two brick narrow bridges were replaced by the present 2-arched bridge placed centrally over a new channel cut through the millsite, the long-buried foundations of the mill being then used to help fill the old channels.

 

Wash Mill or Yardley Mill, perhaps dating from 1385, mentioned in 1751, remained a corn mill all its working life: rebuilt in the 18th century, it went out of use early in the 20th century, surviving as a farm into the 1920s. Its long race began near Coventry Road, and filled a pool (north from the modern Hobmoor Road) which was not completely infilled until 1957. The mill was on a site west of Millhouse Road opposite Mintern Road.

 

Greethurst (Coldbath or Lady) Mill. Greethurst Estate was probably centred on Bulley Hall, from which the outfall of Coldbath Pool is half a mile down the brook. This may have been the site of Greethurst, later called Holte's Mil : but these may be earlier names for Lady Mill, whose pool was just below Coldbath. Yardley Wood Road crossed the brook by its dam, the mill being on the east side of the road. Both pool and millsite are identifiable. At one time Lady Mill was a thread-mill, and in its last years was employed in wire-drawing, being demolished shortly after 1834.

 

Sarehole Mill was in existence before the Reformation, rebuilt in 1542. Formerly supplied only by Coldbath Brook, in 1768 it also received Cole water by a half-mile leat from the ‘Whyrl-hole'. Rebuilding in 1773 included a forge and blade-grinding machinery: about 1840 a steam-engine was installed, and the forge was made into a 2-storey house. Metal grinding and boring continued into the mid-19th century, and corn-milling until 1919, Sarehole being thus the last Yardley mill to go out of use. The 3-storey mill building, the empty engine house with its chimney, and the house, survived in a ruinous state for some years: the two iron wheels are still in their chambers, the pool is silted and overgrown, and the Cole leat is infilled. Plans to restore the forge and make the mill a museum of rural industry await funds from a public appeal (since 1964 the mill has been renovated and opened as part of the City's museum).

 

Hay Mill, presumably associated with Hay Hall nearby, was a 'Boreing Mill' on Beighton's map of 1725. In 1820 it was a blade-mill, with a small triangular pool just below the embankment of the Warwick Canal. About 1830 a new mill was erected 200 yards downstream and a larger pool added. The works were enlarged in 1847, and the pools now extended south to the confluence with the Tyseley Brook. Wire-drawing machinery was installed in 1860, and five years later there were further drastic alterations: Webster and Horsfall obtained a contract for sheathing wire for the first Atlantic cable, and they abandoned water-power. Pools and tail-race were infilled. The side-race, bordered by factory buildings, is the only survival of the watermill, in an area dramatically altered by the huge clinker mounds of the former Tyseley Destructor Works, which was built over the site of the first mill and pool.

 

Broomhall Mill site was at the junction of two small streams, a half-mile from the ancient moated site of Broom Hall. There is a possible reference to its race ('the Rasse') in the 1609 Boundary Report. First noted in 1778, when it was in use as a corn mill, it was disused a century later. The site, in Fox Hollies Park, is at the foot of a concrete cascade on the one surviving brook, and no trace of the building can be found.

Titterford Mill seems to have been the last mill to be built on the Cole, since it is not in evidence before 1783: it was then advertised as 'a new complete water corn mill, 2 water wheels, 4 pairs of stones, a dressing mill, and a new wire mach (mesh ?) with garners that will hold upwards of 2,000 bags of wheat. Also a dwelling-house with a bake-house and implements, and about 3 acres of meadow'. An 8-acre pool, fed by half-mile leats from the Cole and Chinn Brook, were dug and embanked beside the river. Titterford seems to have converted to steel-rolling about the mid-19th century, its corn grinding machinery being removed to Sarehole, which was also changing function. A 20 hp steam-engine was installed to supplement the 6 hp of the wheels, and the mill continued to roll steel for pen-nibs until the First World War. A fire caused the demolition of the mill building in 1926, and the house went soon in the 1930s. The millpond was infilled, but the great pool survives. The millsite was at the junction of Priory and Trittiford Roads.

 

 

 

The small gradient and variable flow of the Cole suggest that the early mills employed undershot wheels. Reference to Hay Mill's 'pool tail' in 1495 shows that it was not on the river but was served by a short leat and a pool made in the riverside meadow, and this was to be the method adopted at Wash, Sarehole, and Titterford Mills. The only surviving wheels, at Sarehole, are one overshot and one breast wheel, and the long leats of the 18th century works elsewhere suggest that these more efficient wheels were brought into use generally. The capital outlay on these mills was a safe venture for so many mills in and around Birmingham had been converted to industrial uses that there was a great lack of corn-milling plant in the region: the coming of steam-power may have saved the Cole from becoming industrialised like the Rea, and the river's watermills, continuing or reverting to corn-milling, survived until roller-mills at the ports, and the decline of arable farming in the area, made even that uneconomic.

 

 

 

Windmills

There have been perhaps 4 windmills in Yardley. The windmill did not appear in Britain until the late 12th century, and was probably much later in the Midlands. The first in Yardley was on Redhill, near the site of the Adelphi Cinema on Coventry Road, recorded in 1578, and shown as a tall postmill on Beighton's map of 1725. This may have been the mill referred to as belonging to the manor of Greet in 1664. By 1800 it was 'Old Mill', and presumably was then out of use. There was a windmill in Yardley belonging to the Gervises in 1689, which was probably that on Wake Green. It stood on a small knoll overlooking Old Pool on the Coldbath Road, was in use in 1773, but gone by 1847. The site, in the copse between two levels of the Moseley Grammar School playing fields, is identifiable. Its nearness to Ladymill may be explained by that mill's having converted from corn-grinding. On Yates's map of 1789 a postmill is shown on Yardley Wood Common, an untraceable site now in the local schools' playing field near Christ Church, but there is no documentary evidence for this. Since it is shown as a postmill, it is unlikely to be a confusion with the nearby brick tower mill just over Solihull boundary. There is a 'Windmill Piece' near Lea Hall, but no record of a mill.

 

 

The Manor of Yardley

Introduction

Overview

Foundation and ownership

Map: descriptive names

Map: geology and roads

Map: early settlement sites

Section two

Ancient roads

Communications

Map: communications

Map: Yardley about 1750

Section three

Antiquities

Watermills and windmills

Section four

Ecclesiastical history

Administration and local government

Map: Yardley Parish and Vestry prior to 1894

Map: Yardley village 1847 to 1904

Map: parishes in 1911

Map: Yardley schools in 1911

 

Return to AGHS Homepage