Greenwood History 3

Herrison Hospital was for the most part a self-contained and self-supporting community. It produced a lot of its own food and a surplus for sale. Just a five minute walk from Greenwood House was the Home Farm, run by an employed manager and staffed by patients. It was located in the northwest of the present day village of Charlton Down, perhaps between Deverell Road and Rowan Walk. It was a large mixed farm with at one time over 400 acres of land. One of its claims to fame was its prize-winning herd of pigs. I think that it bred different varieties at different times but it was most famous for its Wessex Saddleback pigs. There were 500 of them in 1968. There is a documentary reference to the sale of 100 breeding Wessex Saddleback pigs and 3 Pedigree Large White boars from the Herrison Herd by Symonds and Sampson in Dorchester in 1969. I know that some villagers today complain about the smell of muck-spreading on the fields around us (!) but back in the days of the farm, Greenwood residents would surely have been hoping each day that the wind was blowing from the south rather than from the piggery. To illustrate what the pigs would have looked like I have used some pictures that I took at the Dorset County Show back in 2014.

The source of my information is In the Course of Time: a History of Herrison Hospital and of Mental Health Care in Dorset 1863 – 1992 edited by Jennifer Rogers.