Situated on the curve of Drake Street near to where the Marlbank Brook passes under the road, Little Brookend is certainly an old farmstead but we do not know just how old it is at present.

The land tax records indicate that William and Mary Bullock owned Little Brookend towards the end of the 18th century and it may then have been called Bennets. Their son Richard Bullock succeeded them.

William Twinberrow bought the estate about 1830. It was tenanted briefly by William Harris but William Twinberrow then farmed it himself. After William Twinberrow’s death in 1841 his great-nephew Joseph Twinberrow took ownership of the property, with Richard Tyler as tenant, and this was still the case when the 1847 tithe map was drawn up. The tithe records show that Little Brookend’s land at the time included four allotments in Tiltridge (one of Welland’s three common fields), nearby on the other side of Drake Street. Another plot of land, Smithfield (now Bidders Croft), lay further east along Drake Street. The farmhouse had an adjoining garden and orchard and the brook formed the western boundary.

At the time of the 1871 census John Bridges was at Little Brookend, farming 20 acres, and by 1881 the tenant was widow Ann Watkins, who described herself as a ‘market woman’ in the census.

The Tombs family had taken over by 1891. Mark Tombs was a carpenter and wheelwright as well as a farmer. He died in 1904 and his wife Rose in 1906. An auction arranged for 28 September that year advertised livestock, crops and numerous agricultural instruments and equipment.

The farm was bought by L D Stowe in 1906 and Elijah Smith took over the tenancy the same year. (L D Stowe may be Louisa Dorothea Stowe, known to be resident in Castlemorton in 1911.) A few years later, in February 1914, the Valuation Office survey described the farmhouse as brick and half-timbered, with a tiled roof and ‘in fair repair’. It had a hall, sitting room, kitchen, back kitchen, dairy, four bedrooms and a box room. There were also a cellar, loft, mill house, coal house, two pig cots, meal house, stable, coal shed, two outhouses and three sheds. The adjoining orchard and a plot of land in Tiltridge were still part of the farm. The market value was assessed at £800.

Elijah Smith was a poultry and dairy farmer, originally from Lancashire. At the time of the 1911 census his household consisted of his wife Blanche, three young daughters, Margery, Elizabeth and Leanore, and a farm labourer, Lugard Douglas Boswell. Blanche Smith remained in occupation until the mid-1950s.

Several of the farm buildings on the site have been converted into separate dwellings over recent decades, forming Mill Cottage, The Old Cider Mill and The Pottynge Barn.