Richard Rogers was a man of enterprise and in the middle years of the century, those years that proved disastrous for so many local farmers, his was a remarkable success story. Where others moved out, he moved in and., moreover, he evidently made a do of it.
   In 1839, Richard owned and. farmed Attwood Place and Gowls Farm, of which the acreage in Ash was some fifty-two acres, and he was also tenant from the Wild family of about forty-three other Ash acres, being part of South Ash Farm. A truer picture of his activities at about that time is provided by the fact that in 1851 be was working two hundred and fifty acres, employing nine men and three boys. He was not the only family freeholder; his sisters, Mary and. Julia, who lived at Great Gowles, near Attwood. Place, were each then described as ‘Landed Proprietor and. Annuitant’, which suggests that their father may himself have sufficiently prospered to make suitable provision for them. However, the land that any of the family actually owned was probably never very extensive and it was as a tenant rather than as a freeholder that Richard. became one of the principal farmers of the locality. During the eighteen-fifties, he took over the remainder of South Ash Farm and moved home from Attwood Place to South Ash Manor. Unhappily, this adventure proved 

short-lived, for in 1860 Richard died.; he was still only in his early sixties.
    By his wife, Sophia, Richard Rogers had five children, a daughter Rebecca, a son John, then twins, Richard and. Elizabeth, and finally another son, Charles; the twins would have come as no great surprise, since their grandmother was a Walter. John, the eldest son, was of age when his father died, but not of an age to run South Ash Farm and, although his mother struggled on for a while, the stay at South Ash was not prolonged. The family was still there in 1861, when Sophia was described as the occupier of six hundred and fifty acres, employing eighteen men and a boy. Not much later, they were back at Attwood Place.
   Sophia was a great collector of fossils and when, in January, 1864, Benjamin Harrison of Ightham paid his first visit to Ash, he chanced to notice a collection of these in the front garden of Attwood Place. Sophia, who was cooking the Sunday dinner while the rest of the family was at church, only found time to show him, the fossils in the garden, reserving the indoor collection for another occasion. That was the first of many visits paid by Harrison to Attwood Place. It was in May of the same year that Sophia asked