I love looking at early photographs of rural settings, but these caught my eye because they were apparently taken just ten years after my own home was built to house farm workers. It's still owned by the successor to the farmer who built it.

1/ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8781059/In-English-Country-Album.html

Originally a terrace of five houses, those either side of me were knocked into one years ago, leaving mine (the middle one) the only one retaining something like the original interior layout.

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The most significant alterations were made in 1910, when kitchens were added to the backs. Before that, there was just a single downstairs room, with a large fireplace for cooking, and an upstairs room reached by some fairly steep stairs. The ceilings are low slung, too.

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I'm only one person of course, but my furniture and ephemera fills the downstairs room, and my bedroom is smaller than that I had when living with my parents, yet there have been periods when twelve people have been living here, in, I suppose, the space of a one-bedroom flat.

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In 1852 three adults and four children are listed in the farm records. In 1861 two families, both with four children are in occupation. In 1883 two adults, an adult lodger, and five children. There's almost always a lodger or an aged parent.

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Until 1922 water had to be brought from a well on the farm or the stream the other side of the woods. Electricity wasn't put in until 1931.

The cottage went with the job, of course, but when old age or accident came along the farmer was very quick to repossess.

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It seems that wives and children were expected to do certain work on the farm at harvest and planting. Tenants could kill foxes but not catch rabbits, which were highly saleable. They were provided with large gardens for growing their own food and keeping fowls.

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Imagine how crowded my house must have been even when tenanted by a single family. And the constant work involved. The fire kept going year round, water to be hauled every day, the cooking (no ready meals or supermarkets then), the washing, dumping body waste in the cesspit.

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All done without gas and electricity, quite apart from water and waste disposal.

Not quite the "Lark Rise To Candleford" idyll, is it?

I've no idea how many people have lived here over the years, but I do know that at least ten were born into it and eight died out of it.

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Of the eight who died out of it four were children, two were relatively young mothers, and two elderly men.

So many lives have been lived in this modest space. I often look about and marvel at how they ever got on. I prize my privacy - hardly an option then.

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My friends, of about my own age, all appear to want to move into large houses with large gardens and rooms they probably won't use, fully furnished, all mod cons and fast broadband to boot.

And they truly believe themselves hard done by because they can't have it.