APPARENTLY, if you are an old stager who has lived in the village of Fernhill Heath, the settlement that straddles the A38 half way between Worcester and Droitwich, you don’t call it Fernhill Heath at all. It’s Fearnhall Heath.

It’s one of those old Worcestershire throwbacks, a bit like Powick today and Powyke yesterday, to mention but one. How long you have to live in Fernhill Heath before you’re not classified as a “newcomer”, Gill Lawley’s comprehensive new book about the life, times and history of the village doesn’t guess. Although having been brought up in Powick and Callow End, I can recall locals who considered any family that had moved there since Oliver Cromwell shot up the parish church of St Peter in 1651 to be still wet behind the ears.

Fernhill Heath didn’t suffer unduly during the English Civil War, mainly because it wasn’t really there. Indeed, by the middle of the 18th century there were still only a few cottages, two farms and the obligatory inn beside the turnpike road clustered where the village is now.

It wasn’t until a workhouse opened on the Droitwich Road just outside Worcester in 1813 that Vernal Heath, as it was then, began to develop. Within 30 years there were 90 houses alongside or behind the road through “Fearnhall Heath”. By 1900 the number had grown to nearly 200. Every decade since the 1920s new houses have been built and now there are well over 1,000 with a population approaching 5,000. Some change from the days of the turnpike.

Gill’s book – called understandably The History of Fernhill Heath – is phenomenally well researched.

“Two of my interests are genealogy and local history,” she explained. “Reseaching my family tree on my paternal line I discovered that some of them had lived in the parish of Martin Hussingtree for more than 100 years. Looking through various documents at the Worcestershire Record Office I became side-tracked and started researching the history of Martin Hussingtree. Work I later turned into my first book Of the Parish Here and There The History of Martin Hussingtree.

“Following on from this, I decided to research the history of Fernhill Heath in the parish of Claines, having lived here for over 40 years. I began this project in 2000 little realising it would take me seven years to complete as I mainly did my research during the winter months. I began to look at various records in the Worcestershire Record Office and Worcester History Centre but much of it made little sense and produced further questions and I began to wonder whether it was worth continuing my search. The breakthrough came when a friend told me of an 18th-century map of the Manor of Claines which included Fernhill Heath, otherwise Vernal Heath as it was then known, and at that time only a small settlement.

This produced many answers that enabled me to move forward and to use other documents to complete the village history.”

The present spelling of Fernhill Heath was adopted in 1938, when it was changed from Fearnhall Heath. Two suggestions for the change have been put forward and I like the first best. In 1852 the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton opened and all trains to Worcester halted at Fearnhall Heath station for tickets to be checked. Sometimes this took a while and local wits, as Gill Lawley describes them, began calling the village “Infearnal Heath”. To stop this the name was tided up to Fernhill Heath and the railway company, which by then had become the Great Western, was persuaded to adopt it. The second suggestion is altogether more autocratic. It has been mooted the 1st Lady Hindlip, from the family of Hindlip Hall fame, disliked Fearnhall Heath and that’s why it was changed. Lord Hindlip, incidentally, was Henry Allsopp, a Derbyshire brewer before finding favour with Queen Victoria and gaining his title for services to his country, which included a spell as East Worcestershire MP.

In 1956 there was an interesting twist to the saga, when a member of North Claines parish council, which covers the village, proposed the name revert to the 18th century “Vernal Heath”. Pointing out, quite logically, “Fernhill Heath hasn’t got a hill and there isn’t any fern and there is something attractive about Vernal. Fernhill Heath is merely a postal address.” Sadly, the proposal was withdrawn and so Fernhill Heath it has remained.

The book is rich with anecdotes and I particularly liked the one about Harry Farley, who was paid the not un-princely sum of £153 a year by Droitwich Rural District Council in the early 1930s to dig out and empty the contents of the villages earth closets. Most properties had one, because there was no mains sewer.

Harry used to arrive with his horse-drawn open dray loaded with a large square tank, into which he shovelled the desposits in the closets.

Apparently, when not used as a sewage wagon, Harry’s cart conveyed other goods, including fruit from the local orchards. Don’t forget to wash that apple.

“It depended on which way the wind was blowing as to whether you could smell Harry coming or going,” writes Gill. “If there was no wind he was with you for the rest of the day.”

* The book is on sale at Fernhill Heath PO and Kasch's Newsagents also of Fernhill Heath. It costs £8.99. `