Ted and Jackie Howard-Jones farm two hundred acres above the Hambleden Valley, the same ground Ted's father bought in 1955, and where Ted was born seven years later. The CL is one of three businesses run from the yard, and the one you are most likely to end up parked on.
A century of Cholsey Farm
The farm has been photographed, mapped and rebuilt often enough over the last hundred years to tell its own story. Most of what follows still stands, and you can walk round nearly all of it.
1921
The farm on the map
The Ordnance Survey of 1921 shows Cholsey Farm laid out much as it still is. A good many of the original buildings are standing, and the farmhouse, the old stables and the farm barn are all listed.
The cartshed is now the map room, with a picnic table in it. The old piggery is a converted farm building off the main yard, looking out across the fields.
1955
The Howard-Joneses arrive
Ted's father, John Howard-Jones, bought the farm in 1955 for £19,500. Under him it became a properly mixed holding: dairy cows, chickens and pigs alongside oats, wheat and barley.
Ted was born on the farm in 1962.
1950s and 60s
Seven chicken sheds and a mill
Through the late fifties and sixties this was a busy mixed farm of pigs, chickens and sheep. The chicken enterprise was the striking one: seven large sheds, birds for eggs and birds for the table.
They were fed on wheat grown here and milled in the farm's own processing mill.
Growing up here
Ted, aged nine
Ted has ridden since he was five. Here he is at nine with Ken Bird, the farm manager, up on the combine at harvest.
He grew up on this ground and knows every field and bridleway on it, which is why the walks we send you on actually go somewhere.
1980s
Crops and two hundred ewes
Like most small farms, Cholsey Grange moved with the times. It went over to mostly crops and sheep, running around two hundred Welsh ewes.
When Ted's father retired it was converted back to crops and horses, which is the ground the riding business and, eventually, the CL grew out of.
2000s
The buildings find new work
The old pigsties and workshops became offices; the old dairy became a cabinet-maker's workshop. The listed oak-framed barn was re-roofed with local, hand-made tiles and now holds hay, logs and tractors.
Ted and Jackie moved into the farmhouse in 2005 with Harry, Fergus and Bobby, and the collies Pip and Meg.
The farm today
Around two hundred acres. In a typical year that is roughly eighty acres of wheat, sixty of conservation chalk bank, twenty of winter bird food, and the rest grazing for the Soay sheep and the horses.
The conservation ground is not decoration. Those chalk banks and the winter bird food are why there is so much to look at from the pitch: the red kites that were reintroduced in these woods, the fallow deer that come out onto the mown grass at night, barn owls working the headlands, and badger setts in the beech.
Most of the original outbuildings now house small businesses that like the location and put up with the farm traffic. Three of the businesses are the family’s own.
Ted and Jackie
Between them they run the farm, the CL and Cholsey Farm Riding. Ted spent more than thirty years in sales and marketing around the world before coming back to it, and still consults for other farms and rural businesses.
If you are here for a week and want to know what the tractor is doing, or which field the sheep are in, ask. They would rather you asked.
How the CL grew
2008
The CL opens
Five pitches on grass, and no electric hook-up at all.
A few years later
Electricity, then WiFi
Hook-ups went in first, then a proper WiFi network across all five pitches.
January 2019
Hardstanding and service bollards
The whole site was rebuilt as 9 m by 9 m hardstanding, each pitch with its own bollard for electricity, fresh water and grey waste. Part funded by an EU LEADER grant.
2020
CL of the Year finalist
Shortlisted in the Caravan and Motorhome Club's national award.
2022
EV charging
A 22 kW charge point installed a hundred yards from the CL, with its own bay.
October 2023
Best CL in England
Voted for by club members and presented at the NEC.
In the wider club
Ted has served as a voluntary nominated member of the Caravan and Motorhome Club’s Club Council. He is an active supporter of CL owners, a founding member of the CL booking website, and represents CL owners in the south-east on the CL Advisory Group, which meets with the club quarterly.
If you own a CL and want to talk about hardstanding, metering or online booking, he is generally happy to.
