Farming
The Paul family farms arable land in three neighbouring parishes east of Cambridge: Bottisham, Little Wilbraham and Great Wilbraham.
What we grow
The farm grows cereals in rotation with break crops. A break crop interrupts the run of cereals in a field, which helps to control the weeds, pests and diseases that build up when the same type of crop is grown year after year, and keeps the soil in good heart for the cereals that follow.
It is the same principle the open fields of these parishes were farmed on for centuries, when each field was rested or changed crop in turn.
Where we farm
The family’s links with all three parishes go back two centuries. The Dennis family, whose farm the Pauls inherited after 1820, held land in each of them.
Home of the farm
Bottisham Place stands at the south end of the village, and the farm is run from here. From the early 19th century most of the farmland in the south of the parish was worked by a handful of large farms run from the village. Bottisham’s open fields were enclosed under an award of 1808.
To the south of Bottisham
Little Wilbraham’s open fields were enclosed under Acts of 1797, and saffron was grown in small plots here in the 1520s and 1590s. Into the 1840s, one of the farms north-east of the village, of about 115 acres, was owned and farmed by the Dennis and Paul family of Bottisham.
Further south, on the chalk
Great Wilbraham lies on the chalk about six miles east of Cambridge. Its four medieval open fields were enclosed in 1797, and saffron was grown in the parish from the mid-16th to the late 17th century. The Dennis family held a 35-acre copyhold here until enclosure.
Through the centuries
All three parishes were farmed in great open fields, usually on a three-course rotation, with meadow and fen on the lower ground used for grazing.
The open fields were divided and enclosed: the Wilbrahams under Acts of 1797, Bottisham under an award of 1808.
Wheat and barley were the main crops, and sheep were kept in large flocks. In the 1830s John Aves, a Southdown breeder at Hall farm in Great Wilbraham, held sales of up to 1,500 sheep a year.
Barley came to dominate, and sugar beet arrived in the 1930s. The sheep flocks were given up by the middle of the century, and far fewer people worked the land: Bottisham had 103 regular farmworkers in 1930 and 22 by 1970.
The family still farms the land in Bottisham, Little Wilbraham and Great Wilbraham, growing cereals and break crops in rotation.
Sources: Victoria County History of Cambridgeshire, vol. 10: Bottisham · Little Wilbraham · Great Wilbraham
Bottisham Place