Alison Uttley

The writer Alison Uttley was born Alice Taylor and was brought up at Castle Top Farm, adjoining High Leas.

She was well known a few years ago for her childrens’ stories, for example “A Traveller in Time,” and she also documented late Victorian farming life in books such as “A Country Child” and “The Farm on the Hill.”
Farm on Hill Jacket

Late in her life she produced “Recipes from an Old Farmhouse” using her late mother’s notes from Castle Top. Amongst the recipes are several from Mrs Taylor’s friends and neighbours including recipes for parkin and cakes made by Mrs Lowe (Catherine Lowe, of High Leas Farm).

In an essay “Stone Walls & Hedges” in her book “Secret Places” she describes the old couple at the remote cottage on Boggart Lane above Woodseats Farm. This was High Leas Cottage, of course.

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Alison Uttley used High Leas as the setting for her little-known novel “High Meadows” which she wrote in the first half of 1937.

She wrote in her diary on 16 March that year:-

“I have been typing, done about 14 pages today, and feel as if I
was in the hay fields at High Leas, then I remember, and life seems so full of cares!” (Thanks to Carol Burrows at Manchester University, Rylands Library, Special Collections, Ref. No. AJU/3/1)

In “High Meadows” the farm is described in detail as it was circa 1900. For example:

“The natural drop in the hillside had compelled the builders of two or three hundred years before to build the barns and sheds and stables adjoining the house on a lower level, with a flight of steps running from the house-yard with its round grass plat and bordering flower-beds, to the larger farmyard below. The parlour, a later addition, was actually built over the calf-place, and the thumps of floundering bodies and the faint sweet animal odour of the young beasts came up through cracks in the wooden floor, to the astonishment of occasional visitors. When the family sat in the best room on Sundays for hymn-singing, the blorting of the calves mingled with the words of the hymns and the delicate tinkle of the ancient piano was often accompanied by the mooing of cattle in the building nearby.”

In 2002 when clearing brambles on a bank near the farmyard, Edward found remains of a small Victorian piano …..