Grove Cottage, Grove Lane

In 1772 Robert Wright, the owner of Rainthorpe Hall, commissioned a map of his estate. The original is held in the Norfolk Record Office (Ref. WLP 10/32) and shows that the site of Grove Cottage formed part of a 3 acre enclosure called Pond Pightle, so the cottage must have been built after that date. Robert Wright was declared bankrupt in 1782, and the Rainthorpe estate was purchased by John Freshfield, a Norwich Merchant. In 1795 he sold Rookery Farm with 14 acres including to Thomas Kett, the tenant farmer. Thomas Kett immediately sold on Rookery House, Rookery Cottage and adjoining barns and meadows but retained the remaining nine and a half acres of land including Pond Pightle. Who actually built Grove Cottage can't be known for sure, but the likelyhood is that Thomas Kett built the cottage for his own occupation before selling it and all his land in 1802 to Simon Rayson. The Listed Buildings register describes the property as an early 19th century cottage but it would seem that a late 18th century date might be more accurate.

Simon Rayson was a wheelwright by trade, and in 1802 he sold his house on Low Road, now known as Commerce House, and bought Thomas Kett's property on Grove Lane, as shown by the Manorial Court records for the following year. On the land where The Maples now stands he built a barn and wheelwright's shop, a building which was still standing in 1906 when the Ordnance Survey published a large scale map of the village. However thirty five years later it had all but disappeared, with just traces of the clay lump walls remaining. In1804 he sold an acre of land, where the Council Houses now stand, and 1805 he built a new house on his adjoining land, now Holly Tree Cottage, which he sold in1807. Finally, in 1810 he sold Grove Cottage as an investment property to Christopher Capon, a painter and gilder from Norwich, who already owned a number of other cottages on Low Road for letting. Mr Capon was still recorded as the owner in 1840 but by then he had split the house into a double cottage, and the first national census the following year records the occupants of one half as David Howlett, a 72 year old wheelwright, and his wife Sarah, with the other end home to a carpenter William Bunn and his wife and four young daughters.

Christopher Capon died in 1844 and his various properties were put up for sale by auction. The purchaser of Grove Cottage was another investor, Robert Bensley, who already owned the Mill, and he also bought three other cottages in Low Road previously owned by Mr Capon. In the Manorial Court records the property is described in the transfer to Mr Bensley as "All that double cottage or tenement formerly of Christopher Capon with the barn, wheelwright's shop, garden and grounds with pump and privy, containing 1 rood and 38 perches (nearly half an acre) occupied by William Atkins and David Howlett," so by then the Bunn family had been replaced by the Atkins family. Sometime before 1851 William Atkins must have died because the census that year records only Mary Atkins, a 35 year-old widow, with her three young daughters as being in occupation of one half. She is referred to as a pedlar so must have been hawking goods door to door in an effort to provide for her family. Sarah Howlett had also died by then because David was living on his own and was described as a pauper and former wheelwright, but whether or not someone else had taken on the wheelwright's shop business isn't known.

Mr Bensley died in 1855 and his various properties were held under the terms of his Will for his wife Harriett for her lifetime but after her death in 1867, the cottage, together with the barn and former wheelwright's shop, was purchased by The Honourable Horace Walpole MP, owner of Rainthorpe Hall. It was still a double dwelling when the Rainthorpe estate was sold to Sir Charles Harvey in 1878, with one half in 1881 occupied by Robert Goose and his family and the other half by an agricultural labourer James Atkins plus his wife and five children. Robert Goose, who had been born in Tharston, was a brickmaker by trade but he died in 1888, leaving his widow Mary Ann and five children who were still living in the property in 1891. By then Robert's cousin, George and his wife Elizabeth plus six children, had replaced the Atkins family, and also with them was George's younger brother, Edward, meaning that in what was essentially a two up, two down property there were four adults and eleven children living there at the date of the census. Perhaps as a result of that overcrowding, the property had been converted back to a single dwelling in the occupation of George Goose and his family by the time of the next census in 1901.

The property remained part of Rainthorpe until 1929, when the estate was offered for sale by auction in 35 lots following Sir Charles Harvey's death. Grove Cottage, Lot 5, was offered subject to the tenancy of George Goose at a yearly rent of £6.50. By 1929 George Goose would have been 72, so it seems more likely that the purchaser was his son, Alfred Goose who worked on the railway, out of Flordon station. Alfred and his sister, Alma, continued living there after their parents died, and that was where he died, sitting in his armchair in the cottage he had known from childhood. After his death in 1971, the property was bought by a builder, but because of concerns that he was planning to pull the cottage down and build new houses on the land up to the Council houses, the Tas Valley Preservation Society stepped in and secured Listed Building status. As a result the cottage was restored, and only a single new house was built on the land, now The Maples. The cottage was bought by Nigel and Joan Tooth, and it changed hands again in 1980, being bought by the current owners. The property was extended in 1986 and again in 2018.