William Eyre, formerly a joiner and wheelwright, took over the lease on Brough Corn Mills in March 1885 and became a corn miller. In 1926 he started to build Nether Moor House on an 11 acre triangular shaped plot on Granby Road. At the time he was 69. The limestone was blasted out from a quarry which was owned by his wife Hannah Eyre which was up the hill at the junction of Outlands Rd and Smalldale Head Rd. The same quarry had in 1924 supplied the stone to build the new mill at Brough after the original mill burnt down. The house was designed by a Sheffield architect, Mr Tether.

We moved in to Nether Moor in November 1982. Soon after that William Eyre (born 1916, died 2003), grandson of the William Eyre who built the house came to visit us and inspect how things had changed. He was very curious to see the house because he hadn’t been back since the late 1950s. We pieced together his information with stories from people who grew up next door on both sides and the grandson of the man who quarry the stone. We also got some information from William Eyre’s book, Goin’ down t’ th’ Mill, a 101 – year diary of the ancient Brough Mill published in 1988.

William Eyre wasn’t able to live in Nether Moor House until 1930. One of the delays was caused by the company supplying the gritstone for the stone mullions and quoins going bust and the building was paused until a new supplier could be found. It’s obvious that two different stones were used because some are more porous than the others.

William Eyre’s wife Hannah had died in 1923 so he moved in with his daughter Florence who was unmarried. Shortly afterwards, William died, in March 1931, so he only lived for a few months in the house he had commissioned. Florence (Flo) continued to live in the house and engaged a companion, Miss Bradbury. They lived mainly in the kitchen, which had a black range in the alcove now occupied by our Aga and a round table piled high with copies of the People’s Friend, the longest-running women’s weekly magazine in the world which was first published in January 1869. During the winter the rest of the house was very cold, and the man who lived next door on the left as a child remembers the icicles inside the windows when he came round with his mother to pay the rent. Our neighbour on the right, whose family has owned his land since the enclosures, also remembers coming here with his father. He was the driver for the local cabinet maker who was responsible for the woodwork in chapels throughout the area and the woodwork in our house including the oak staircase.

Florence kept hens in the croft behind the house and grew vegetables in the garden to the left of the patio. There was a small gate into the field next door where the Physocarpus now grows. The wall all down that side of the garden was rebuilt in about 2000 so the gate disappeared but until we developed the Japanese garden there was a concrete path to the former gateway. Goin’ down t’ th’ Mill has a photo of Florence standing on the path and we photographed her nephew standing in about the same position when he visited us. Florence sold the house in 1956. She dropped dead getting out of bed in January 1958.

Until the 1990s water supplies to Bradwell relied on a small reservoir on Bole Hill between Mompesson’s Grave and Highcliffe. There wasn’t a lot of water pressure so houses along Granby Road relied on the water being delivered up the hill by an electric pump. When there was power cut a couple of hours later our water dried up. All the houses has water storage tanks to collect rain water for use when it was dry or the water didn’t arrive. Ours is underneath the dustbins by the glass back door.

The glass back door leads into the extension which we built as our millennium project with Noel, friend, neighbour, and builder doing the building work, while we did the project management, sourcing and internal finishing – including the underfloor heating, fitting the wood burning stove and all the wood cladding. From the first sketches in 1999, it took until Christmas 2005 to move in with a lot more still to do internally. The extension replaced the old outbuildings which included a washhouse, an outside toilet and a coal store. The stone from the out buildings was re-used on the new building. There is more about the extension project here (link to another page not yet written)