Punch Bowl Farm (formerly Pit Farm or Pitlands)

From Historic England: House. C17 extended in C20. Sandstone rubble with brick angle quoins and dressings, and brick extensions, under plain tiled roofs, hipped to right. Two storeys with gable lit attics over basement plinths. Plat band over ground floor and rear stack to left. Two first floor and one ground floor casement window, one window on each floor and one in the basement storey on the left hand return front. One five-light casement window between the timbers of the gable end. Ribbed door to right in pentice roofed porch in the re-entrant angle formed by the two ranges. Wooden C17 window mullions in window adjacent to re-entrant angle on wing.

From an undated painting by Eva Webb

Below is the lease for Pitlands 1560

This picture was painted by Eveline Lance who lived at The Outlook c1920

Field map of Punch Bowl Farm

John and Mary Keen at the turn of the 20th Century and other contemporary photographs

Photographs of Peter, Jo and Sally Scheffers and the farm taken in the 1970s

Punch Bowl Farm, formerly known as Pitlands or Pit Farms, retains a three bay timber-framed house dating from the 16th century with a large smoke bay at the southern end. In the 17th century a stone parlour wing was built in front of the original two-storey house. This wing has two storeys plus an attic as well as a cellar underneath. The farm was formerly part of the Cosford Estate until its sale, by auction, in 1952 to Monica and Bill Edwards. Punch Bowl Farm was then immortalised in print by the numerous books written by Monica, the most famous being “The Unsought Farm’. I the late 1960s, Monica and Bill retired to the bungalow they had built above the farm but close to the badgers Monica still holds so dear.

The Scheffers’s moved into the farm in September 1981. Four years later the land at Upper Highfield Farm was purchased from John Robertson and both farms are worked as one producing beef cattle and sheep. In 1994 the Punch Bowl Fold of Highland Cattle was formed and are grazed, during the summer, in the newly fenced northern section of the National Trust’s ‘Devil’s Punch Bowl’. As well as the farm animals we also have three horses, two cats, a goose and one elderly, but very naughty donkey, ‘Briar Rose’.