Tyre Hill House lies east of the B4208 (Welland Road) close to the boundary with Hanley Swan. The modern house is very different from the original house and associated farm buildings that survived until the late 19th century. These seem to have been close by, north-east of the current house.

The earliest known occupants of the Tyre Hill estate are the Badger family, whose names occur in the 16th and early 17th centuries. ‘Roger Bager’ appears in the Little Malvern Priory 1537 rental recorded at the time of the dissolution.

Giles Nanfan rented Tyre Hill in the mid-17th century. (The Nanfan family held the manor of Birtsmorton from 1424-5 until 1771.)

We get a glimpse of the house itself from owner William Chamflower’s will of 1709. The inventory mentions a kitchen, hall, great parlour, little parlour, ‘chamber next garden’, cheese chamber, buttery and malthouse, plus two chambers upstairs and a loft. The total value of the house contents and farming equipment, stock and crops, came to £782 7s 10d, showing Tyre Hill to be the property of a well-to-do gentleman.

Richard Randle, a later tenant to owner Mrs Baylis, gave up the estate in 1814 and an auction of farming stock was duly advertised: ‘Valuable Farming Stock, Implements in Husbandry, fine flavoured Cider and Perry, large Rick of Old Wheat, some Household Furniture, and other Effects’.

The Davis family of Hanley Hall owned Tyre Hill from the 1830s to 1901. The 1841 census shows the occupants of the house at ‘Tire Hill’ were John Drinkwater, agricultural labourer, and his wife, Nancy.

Possibly the same John Drinkwater was the occupier mentioned in Welland’s tithe records a few years later. He had the use of the house and garden while owner William Davis managed the agricultural land. The fields belonging to the estate were named as: the Forty Acres, Tire Hill Fold and Buildings Orchard, Cow Pasture, Red Hill, Tire Hill Orchard, part of a coppice, Flashers Ground, Broad Meadow, Gilliver Lane Ground, The Orles and the Old Hopyard. The tithe map shows the house and its fold of farm buildings a short distance north-east of the current house.

In the 1861 and 1871 censuses John Davis, carpenter and wheelwright, and his wife Mary Ann, were living there and there were probably labourers in occupation in 1881. There are no entries in the census for 1891 and 1901 so perhaps the house was no longer habitable or had been taken down by then.

A new chapter began in the estate’s history when Edward St Lawrence Walker, originally of Birstall Holt, Leicester, bought the Hanley Hall estate in 1901, and built a substantial house on the Tyre Hill site for his own use. He was a noted horse breeder and former Master of the Croome Hounds. Walker did not live to enjoy his new home for long as he died in March 1908.

Tyre Hill was then sold as part of the Hanley Hall estate in July the same year. The sales brochure describes a spacious seven-bedroomed house and includes mention of the house’s well, about 60 feet deep, from which water could be pumped and stored in cisterns in the roof of the house. The brochure also describes the entrance lodge on the Welland Road as newly built. The whole Hanley Hall estate was bought by Francis William Romney, a solicitor in Malvern. He seems to have rented out Tyre Hill but was living there himself in the late 1920s.

According to the 1921 electoral register, Tyre Hill Lodge was occupied by Lucie Jarrett, district nurse and midwife for Hanley Castle Nursing Association, and her boarder Sophie Hooke.

By the 1930s William Edward Charteris Watkinson, originally from Yorkshire, was living in the big house and running the farm. During WWII the house was sequestered for the war effort as a billet for troops. Watkinson joined the Home Guard and returned to live in the house after the war. He had an engineering degree and was keen on cars and steam trains as well as farming. He died in 1981.

Over the last few decades, the 1901 house has been extended and modernised. The surrounding land is now used by a livery yard.