Rogersceugh isn’t a place that featured in many people’s thoughts down the centuries. Except in 1695 and in the last five or six years.
In that time, it has arisen from the Solway marshes, and is being returned to them.
Rogersceugh in 1695
In ‘the seventh year of the rayne of our soveraigne Lord William the Third,’ Sir John Lowther (2nd Baronet, 1642-1706) came to an agreement with the freeholders of Bowness on Solway parish.
Namely Thomas Lawson the elder, John Lawson the younger, John Will the elder, John Will the younger, John Sharpe, Thomas Draipe, George Ayrton, John Peat, John Clarke, Thomas Clarke, Edward Sharpe, and Gerard Ritson.
The document, as ever in these cases, runs to several, verbose pages. But basically, it’s a deal concerning:
‘the parcel of land called Rogersceugh’.
In short, Sir John Lowther agreed to fence off and drain 20 acres at Rogersceugh at his own expense,
‘to create a duckery.’
And the local freeholders agree to him having the land.
Why?
Well, Sir John Lowther was the lord of the manor and you probably didn’t say know to him, even if you did own your own land and didn’t have to pay him any form of rent.
But Rogersceugh was, in 1695:
‘encompassed by boggy and mossy ground and subject to several trespasses, losses and inconveniences’.
In other words, the locals didn’t want it anyway. And if Sir John wanted to ‘digge, make, cast and complete a good and sufficient bank or fence upon or about the said released land’ at his own expense, then it was no skin off their noses.
The deed also binds Sir John’s ‘heirs and assigns’ to the project.
And what did Sir John Lowther get from his trouble and expense?
Well, he SAID he intended to build ‘a duckery’.
Rogersceugh in 1742
Fast forward, and
Documentary evidence regarding historic repairs to the buildings at Rogersceugh Farm, dating from 1742, relate to the repairs required for a farmhouse in very poor condition.
So it seems the duckery either didn’t work, or was never the plan anyway.
Could it be that Sir John’s intentions always were to drain the moss and build a farm there?
It was common land, and the freeholders might have been reluctant to agree to him enclosing it.
But by framing it: “I’ll take that useless bit off bog off your hands, and do you a favour”…
For sure, 1695 described Rogersceugh as a parcel of land. But by 1742 there was a tatty house. And it wasn’t a duck house!
An archaeological date site says that after 1742:
plans were drawn up for the full replacement of this structure with a smallholding, comprising a farmhouse flanked by a double byre and a single byre. Remnants of this can still be seen at Rogersceugh Farm, which makes this farm a rare example of a clearly planned and designed smallholding, although it has since been significantly altered and extended to create a large farmstead.
It isn’t easy to build anything on a bog, but there was some solid ground there (a drumlin), and by 1742 for sure, Rogersceugh farm was perched on top of it.
However, it doesn’t seem to have been a great success.
Rogersceugh in 1802
Fast forward again, and Rogersceugh is:
“quite forsaken and at present of little value.”
And:
‘Any fences have fallen down.’
So for sure, the Lowther ’heirs and assigns’ hadn’t kept Sir John’s promise. And the farm hadn’t proved worth the Lowthers’ while to maintain it.
Victorian times
When the 1839 tithe map was drawn up, it was being farmed by Pattinson Lawson, owner of Bowness Hall and its 451 acres.
But most of the Rogersceugh land is recorded as either moss or ‘uncultivated’: just 54 acres (of 316) of the land Pattinson Lawson was renting are listed as ‘arable’.
In 1841, there were Lawsons at Rogersceugh, with a section of the census to themselves, namely:
Richard 70, Sarah 50, Joseph 17, and Robert 13.
But by 1851, they’d moved to Bowness.
There was also a young gamekeeper, William Robinson, 30, with wife Ellen, 25, and daughterJane Ann, 2. And curiously, an ag lab called Margaret Little, 31, with six children aged 12 down to 6 months.
They didn’t stick around, either.
In 1851, Rogersceugh was occupied by William Waiting, 47, a farmer bailliff, with his wife and seven children. He was born in Westmorland and wife Maria in Dover, Kent. So new to the area. Son George, 2, was born Bowness, so they likely had moved to Rogersceugh about 1849.
It was to let again just two years later.
‘The greatest proportion of this farm consists of moss land, of which about 140 acres have recently been drayned, clayed and broken up.’
By 1853, it was being run by John Sibson, and his wife and family. They were born at Grinsdale, so again may not have known fully what they were taking on.
They stuck at it, though, with son John Sibson taking over down the line and still there in 1886, when the Lowthers advertised it to let, ‘with 490 acres of arable and pasture land’.
The farm was taken by John Little, who was born at Brackenrigg and, aged six, living ‘next door’ to Rogersceugh on the 1851 census, with his family.
John Little left Rogersceugh in 1902, with his brother William Little, of Bowness Hall, taking it on (in addition to the hall).
The end of Rogersceugh Farm
It would seem the farm buildings were bought by the RSPB in 2004 for just under £120,000.
The farm was rented out for a while, but not maintained due to lack of funds.
This was the case at North Plain, on the Solway coast, where the farmhouse and buildings looked really tatty when they were put on the market by the RSPB in 2018.
Rogersceugh was described in a 2004 BBC report as:
‘a former livestock farm, of 205 acres’.
The Rogersceugh buildings were demolished in 2020, for Natural England and the RSPB to restore Bowness Common.
This met with opposition from local people, who thought the farm was unique.
The RSPB responded that the buildings were:
‘…a significant health and safety risk, they are uninhabitable and unfit for purpose..’
The aim of the project was to restore the farm to a peat bog.
“Creating an uninterrupted bog, as we hope to Rogersceugh, can support populations of rare curlews, snipe and marsh fritillary butterflies.”
In 2024, Cumbria Wildlife Trust wanted to block drainage ditches and to install ‘deep trench cell bunding’ across approximately 16 hectares of Rogersceugh (source)
So, some 325 years after Sir John Lowther did his deal with local farmers to fence off the bog at Rogersceugh and drain it, conservation bodies decided to get rid of the fences and return the land to the ‘moorish, boggy waste’ it had been.