Ashholme

Ashholme, variously spelt, was for several generations owned and farmed by the yeoman Grindon family.

It lay within or near Warslow in Alstonefield parish in north Staffordshire, but its precise location has now been lost. Indeed at the beginning of the 1900s its site was already unknown. In their book on the Beresford family the Reverend William Beresford and Samuel Beresford, even with their vast local knowledge, could only conjecture that it "may be the place now known as Hulme End" (1).

There were at least two separate farms there during the lifetime of William Grindon who died in 1726 and his brother John Grindon.

Judging from the detailed Inventory of the possessions of their grandfather who died in 1659 the families were largely self-sufficient and the land at Ashholme was of considerable size. In the grandfather's time there was a herd of cattle but also a valuable flock of sheep, with three spinning wheels and three looms for weaving the sheared wool.

There were also oxen for the plough, and arable farming was more likely to have been profitable in the lower lands near to the river Manifold, now bridged but then forded at Hulme End, rather than in the upper moorlands of Alstonefield parish.

Reference

(1) Beresford of Beresford: Part One: a History of the Manor of Beresford in the County of Stafford W. Beresford and S.B. Beresford (1908) page 58. The authors were local historians with a profound knowledge of the district, the Reverend William Beresford being the local Rural Dean and Samuel Beresford the Francis Galton Prizeman for Family Records. They are there referring a document in the Drury Collection D.98 by which William and Joanna Mabby of Longford in Derbyshire granted the Warslow lands formerly owned by John Stele of Warslow to John Beresford of Beresford. The witnesses to the deed included "Richard de Beresford of Assheholme" (page 56).