The old Pound houses
Loxwood History places the origins of Little Pound Farm and Pound Cottage in the sixteenth century. Historic England records Little Pound Farmhouse as seventeenth-century and Pound Cottage as seventeenth century or earlier.
Little Pound Farm is L-shaped, with painted brick at ground-floor level, tile-hanging above and two gables facing north. Tile-hanging uses overlapping clay tiles as an outer covering to the wall. Pound Cottage keeps more of its timber frame, with plaster and painted brick between the timbers, a tiled roof and a half-hipped end. Historic England records it as two storeys with four windows. Inside Little Pound Farm, later sale particulars record exposed beams, two large inglenook fireplaces and an old bread oven. A well remains beneath the drawing-room floor, reached through a trapdoor.
The Pound landscape
A pound was an enclosure where livestock could be held, and Loxwood History records the older name Penlands for land in this part of the village. The 1830 enclosure map names Pound Field and Chestnut Mead nearby. Local maps also place Pound farmland on both sides of the present Guildford Road, extending towards Pawlies Farm.
The road through that holding changed in 1775 when the turnpike was made along the line of the present Guildford Road. The enclosure of Loxwood Common in 1830 then fixed the route that became Spy Lane. A small watercourse, known locally as Paulies Brook, crossed the Pound land on its way towards the River Lox.
Water from the well
Before Loxwood received a mains water supply, the well at Little Pound Farm provided water at the house. Water for the kitchen, washing and other household use had to be raised from the well and carried where it was needed. Loxwood received mains water in 1938, but the well was left in place.
The 1974 sale notice described a trapdoor in the drawing-room floor with the well directly beneath it. Later sale particulars continued to record the same feature after the house had been modernised.
Pounds House in 1851
The census taken on 30 March 1851 recorded Little Pound Farm under the name ‘Pounds House’. William Brusey, an agricultural labourer aged fifty-eight, lived there with his wife Sarah, aged fifty-nine, and his widowed mother Ann, aged eighty-four. William and Ann had been born at Wisborough Green; Sarah came from Cranleigh.
Ann Brusey’s census entry reads ‘Pauper Wid of Ag Lab’. It was the official wording for the widow of an agricultural labourer who was receiving poor relief. No occupation was entered for Sarah. Ann was still living with her son and daughter-in-law at the age of eighty-four.
The enumerator then moved directly to three dwellings recorded as Slyhurst cottages. Loxwood History Archive identifies Pound Cottage within this group and records another building between Pound Cottage and Little Pound Farm that was later removed. Two of the Slyhurst homes were described as first and second tenements, meaning separate households within the same building.
William Finch, who occupied the first tenement with his wife Harriet and their school-age son, was a gardener. Walter Smithers in the second was an agricultural labourer. The third cottage was headed by agricultural labourer James Hill. His twenty-one-year-old son George was also an agricultural labourer, while his seventeen-year-old daughter Ann was a general servant ‘out of place’, the census term used when a domestic servant was temporarily without a position.
The Dependant Brethren in Spy Lane
When the census was taken again in 1861, research has identified both Little Pound Farm and Pound Cottage with households belonging to the Dependant Brethren. Their chapel had recently opened a short distance away in Spy Lane.
The Brethren were the rural religious community founded by John Sirgood, the shoemaker and preacher whose work in Loxwood drew many agricultural labourers and other working families. Members were also living at Old Cottage, Four Houses and other nearby homes in Loxwood.
The Barnards at Pound House
By the early twentieth century the Barnard family was associated with Pound House. James Barnard had spent more than thirty years as a mathematics master at Christ’s Hospital, the ancient school which moved from London to Horsham in 1902. He became head of its Royal Mathematical School, a branch founded in the reign of Charles II to teach mathematics and navigation.
Barnard retired to Loxwood after several years at Horsham. When he died suddenly in 1927, aged seventy-six, the West Sussex County Times devoted a substantial notice to his teaching career. It credited him with strict discipline, clear logic and orderly methods, and reported that about sixty of his senior pupils had won mathematical scholarships at Cambridge or Oxford. About fifteen became scholars of Trinity or St John’s College, Cambridge, and several went on to high places in mathematics and public life.
At the harvest thanksgiving services in October 1913, the West Sussex Gazette recorded that Mrs and the Misses Barnard helped decorate Loxwood church. Full congregations attended the morning and evening services, and the offertories for the Royal Surrey County Hospital at Guildford amounted to £4 17s 6d. Fifteen years later the Worthing Herald supplied a lighter detail from Pound House. A monthly puzzle had produced no completely correct entry, but two competitors made only one mistake and shared the £10 prize. One was Mrs H. Barnard of Pound House, Loxwood, who received £5 in July 1928.
The Naumanns at Little Pound Farm
Earlier census material in the Little Pound Farm archive records Frank Gustavus Naumann, a coffee merchant, and his wife Annie Constance at Redhurst in Cranleigh in 1911. Their household included a groom, cook and other domestic staff. The 1921 census recorded Annie Constance there as a widow with her son Charles Cecil, then a student. The return listed a cook-housekeeper and four maids among the household at Redhurst.
By August 1948 a Mrs F. Naumann was living at Little Pound Farm. On Saturday 28 August the lawn was used for a large Conservative garden meeting prompted by changes to the parliamentary boundaries of West Sussex. Loxwood was moving from the Chichester division into Horsham, and members of the two divisions met at the farmhouse before the change took effect. The West Sussex Gazette reported the gathering on 2 September.
Garden Cultivations at Pound Cottage
In the same year Garden Cultivations traded from the cottage and advertised practical work for local gardens, orchards and smallholdings. Its notices in the West Sussex County Times offered a rotary cultivator to prepare seedbeds after early crops and an autoscythe for grass in orchards, chicken runs, small areas of hay and overgrown ground. One advertisement began with the practical question, ‘Clearing early vegetables?’ before offering to prepare the next seedbed.
Customers could arrange the work by the hour or by the day. Another advertisement offered regular lawn mowing. The business telephone number was Loxwood 328.
‘An Ancient Cottage in Spy Lane’
Little Pound Farm went on the market in December 1974. The Esher News and Mail advertised it under the headline ‘An Ancient Cottage in Spy Lane’. The house then stood in about half an acre of garden, with a large walnut tree and open country beyond. It had three reception rooms and four bedrooms beneath its handmade tiled roof.
Exposed beams remained inside, together with the inglenook fireplaces. The drawing-room floor contained a trapdoor leading to the well below. The newspaper also recorded that the property had been modernised while the older beams, fireplaces and other features remained. Outside, an old barn already had planning consent for conversion to guest accommodation or a games or party room. The asking price was about £46,000.
Grade II listing and the old interiors
On 22 May 1985 Little Pound Farmhouse and Pound Cottage were separately added to the statutory list of buildings of special architectural or historic interest at Grade II. Historic England recorded Little Pound Farm as an L-shaped farmhouse and Pound Cottage as a timber-framed cottage with a half-hipped tiled roof.
Later sale particulars describe how much of the old interior remains at Little Pound Farm. The drawing room has a broad inglenook with a wood-burning stove and an oak bressumer, the heavy timber spanning the fireplace opening. An inglenook is the deep recess formed around a large hearth. The dining room has a second inglenook with exposed brickwork and small display niches. Beside it is the old bread oven.
