Situated in our home county of Hampshire, roughly halfway between our home city of Portsmouth and our south coast rivals in Southampton, just off the M27 motorway between Swanwick and Hedge End (wow Mark, you’re spoiling us with these approximate geographical locations of things!) is Manor Farm Country Park, and if you’re reading this then there’s a very good chance that you knew all that already and simply want to find out more information or a review or just some photos of the place before deciding if you should pay it a visit. Photos, I can do. Reviews, I don’t really do, but I will let you know if we liked it. And information, well you can get that from the official site – Manor Farm – and you always should because that will contain the most up-to-date details about opening times and prices and such.
In May 2013 we visited Manor Farm because my sister-in-law wanted to take my niece there and wanted some company. So she, her daughter, her parents, my wife, and I all drove there and proceeded to have a lovely day in the sunshine, enjoying as a group the farm animals outside and my very young niece’s reactions to them, then just my wife and me heading to the wartime house and a nearby church for a look inside them.
We started at the farm area of Manor Farm, and, as the name might lead you to suspect, the animals there were all the typical ones you’d find on a farm: cows, sheep, pigs, horses, goats, hens, rabbits. Okay, I don’t know what sort of farms have rabbits either but just go with it. Everyone likes bunnies, don’t they? Actually, pigs are some of my wife’s favourite animals – it’s an intelligence thing – and there were plenty of breeds of those so she was happy.
Manor Farm opened to the public in 1984 after purchase by Hampshire county council in the 1970s but its history is a lot older. A church was originally built around this area in the thirteenth century and various farms and buildings would have grown up around it soon after. The farmhouse building that can be visited as part of the wartime house at Manor Farm dates to the fifteenth century.
The living museum experience on the site is in the form of the fifteenth century farmhouse that shows what farm life in a house in the 1940s would have been like. We do like seeing these snapshots in time in places like this; all the various objects in situ and a genuine sense of everyday life.
Close to Manor Farm was St Bartholomew’s Church so we had to take a wander inside this small building too. The church was originally built in the thirteenth century as the Church of All Saints but when a new, larger church was built in the nineteenth century to serve the same congregation further away this church was rededicated. Norman and Georgian architectural elements can be seen inside and we found the church to be small but perfectly pleasant and a nice cool escape from the warmth outside.
There was more to see and do on the day of our visit and more has been added since so I’d say it’s well worth a visit. It’s probably a very nice day out for families with small children, but as an adult couple there was enough of interest for us to enjoy it too.