Yer Tiz, Park Hill, Whitecroft (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 00:05 (2082 days ago) @ nathanstockill

Hi, warm welcome to the forum and the FoD,

Love the house name ! - first time I heard "Yertiz" was a pupil at the FoD Grammar School at Berry Hill in the 70s, it was used as the name for the magazine the pupils produced as part of their annual charity week fund-raising.

Hard to tell about your specific house's history without visiting it or seeing photos, this is the "official" Whitecroft history according to the Victoria County history website;

"The village of Whitecroft, at a crossing of Cannop brook, grew up on extraparochial land and an adjoining part of Bream tithing of Newland. There was at least one cottage within the tithing in the late 17th century but most of the original dwellings, including 16 cottages recorded in 1782, were placed randomly on Crown land. To the north, terraces containing 30 cottages were built before 1834 on either side of the Severn & Wye tramroad (later railway) for employees in the Parkend collieries. They were demolished in the 20th century, one row surviving until the mid 1970s. On the east side of Whitecroft a chapel on the hillside opposite Pillowell dates from 1824 and some building had taken place on the north side of the new Bream-Yorkley road by 1878. In 1874 the main part of the village including Parkhill had 116 houses with a population of 610. To the north on the Parkend road, completed in 1903 as part of the route linking Lydney and Lydbrook, there was little building before the mid 20th century when several industrial workshops were erected. On the south side of Whitecroft, where a factory was built in 1866, industrial sites developed on both sides of the Lydney road in the later 20th century. During that period small estates of private and council houses grew up on both sides of the Yorkley road, and in the late 1980s a few private houses were built east of the Parkend road. At Parkhill, on the west side of Whitecroft where some of the early cottages on Crown land stood, there were 18 houses in 1851. In the early 20th century several houses were built to the northwest and in 1923 West Dean rural district council built seven pairs of houses north of the Bream road. More council houses were built in the 1930s and the council estate was extended northwards in 1949. Further along the Bream road several brick buildings put up in the early 20th century for Princess Royal colliery survived in 1992."

https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/glos/vol5/pp300-325
(Prob best to open any links in a new tab or window).

Earliest Trade Directory I can find that mentions Whitecroft, albeit only wrt a couple folk, is this one from 1868.
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~cbennett/genealogy/lydney1868.htm

A few years later Whitecroft came under West Dean, and earned a paragraph of it's own, eg
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~cbennett/genealogy/westdean1870.htm
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~cbennett/genealogy/westdean1876.htm

Do you know any names/professions of past owners of your house, so as to be able to identify it in the old Census' etc ?. Or maybe it's near to a landmark such as old pub or Church ?.

Nice old OS map of Whitecroft area here, can zoom into see detail, c1878 so a bit later than's ideal for your house but the earliest I can find online, the Gage Library at the Dean Heritage Centre may have more.
https://maps.nls.uk/view/120756932

Lots of old photos of Whitecroft here,
https://www.sungreen.co.uk/Lydney/_LydneyPage3.htm

I appreciate none of this answers your specific questions about your house, but hopefully it's of interest and may lead to more.