Shearings Yard, Low Road 

(now Kylestones and Seeonee)

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Shearing's Yard was the name given to a group of three cottages which were demolished in 1972/3. The oldest of the three stood end on to the road, with a semi-detached pair close to it but further back towards Burrfeld Park. The name originated from the Shearing family who lived in one of the cottages for more than 50 years at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Sarah Wicks was recorded as the owner both in the 1818 Enclosure Award and in 1840 at the time of the Tithe Apportionment Award with the cottages being let. The 1841 census gives the names of the first known occupiers and their occupations which included an agricultural labourer, a weaver and in the middle cottage a baker, John Buck, who was still there in 1851. No doubt his flour would have come from the Mill almost opposite.

At some point in the next ten years John Shearing and his family moved into the old cottage closest to the Mill, as his name appears in the 1861 census along with his wife, Eliza, and two young children, John and Samuel, with a third son, Robert, being born one year later. John Shearing had been born in Mulbarton and was described as a fish merchant, no doubt collecting deliveries from Flordon station in wooden boxes packed with ice. However, it seems that by 1871 the fish business wasn't bringing in enough money, because the census that year shows that all three sons were out at work; the eldest John 14, at the Mill, Samuel 12, at the Tharston brickworks and even the youngest Robert just 9, as an agricultural labourer.

Not long after, the fish business must have closed down because by 1881 John Shearing had fallen back on the default occupation of agricultural labourer, his eldest two boys had left home and Robert was working on the railway as a platelayer. Perhaps Robert was able to get his father a job there because by 1891 John Shearing is recorded as a railway labourer, and he was still working there in 1901, aged 71. He had retired however by 1911 as he and his wife were described as old age pensioners. Occupiers of the other two cottages during the Shearings time were mainly workers at the Tharston brickworks or employed as agricultural labourers. John Shearing died in 1913, bringing to an end the family's link to Shearing's Yard, but the cottages continued to be referred to by that name until after WW2, as recorded by William Moore in "Hard Times and Humour", his memories of growing up and living in Tasburgh during the 1940s and 50s.

After the cottages were demolished, the first house to be built on the site was bought in 1974 by Brian and Ann Fairley who named it Kylestones, with Seeonee being built shortly afterwards and subsequently extended. The long strip of Seeonee's garden behind Burrfeld Park is probably a remnant of the old strip system of farming when all the land between Low Road and the Hill Fort was the open Borough Field. Until 1905 the village Poor's Land Charity owned a similar adjoining strip of land.