than sold, as the Society tended to do elsewhere; and about £7,000 could be raised quite quickly from the sale of timber, after which the woods should be let to the Forestry Commission.
The Society generally followed these recom mendations over the next thirty years and also sold (unmodernised) the cottages not let with the farms. Apart from two cottages built in 1949 for Wicken Park Farm, the Society left the provision of new housing to the local council, to which they sold building land as required. The former estate water supply was also transferred (as a gift) to the R.D.C. in 1948. (fn. 313) The mansion was let almost at once to a private schools syndicate, (fn. 314) and in 1949, after timber to the value of £12,000 had been sold, the woodland was leased to the Forestry Commission for 200 years at £43 16s. 6d. a year. The estate was extended in 1951 by the purchase of 128 a. of glebe land and cottages, bringing the total outlay to £103,000 for 3,170 a. At the end of 1958 the gross income had risen to £9,116, net £5,242, or 4 Per cent on capital invested, better than the prediction made in 1945. The average rent (including woodlands) was then 57s. an acre.
By 1964 only 37 a. had been sold at Wicken for a total of £25,000. This included land for council housing and a new parsonage, the old estate yard, and some of the cottages, which made between £250 and £350 when the first were sold in 1956. Others followed at prices ranging from £900 to £1,350 and by 1970 a total of 52 had been sold. The first major disposals came in 1967, when Manor Farm was broken up and the house and buildings were sold for £13,600, together with 103 a. of land. By 1972 sales had realised £65,000; since the Society had spent £106,000 on improvements, the estate then had a net book value of £144,000 for 3,075 a. By 1961 farm rents had risen to an average of 61s. an acre; in 1974 they reached £10. The net yield on the estate was then 4.6 per cent. There were no further disposals in the 1970s, apart from some cottages (of which over 60 had been sold by December 1979), but farms continued to be amalgamated. In 1980, when the gross rental was £97,600, the estate was let to five principal farm tenants, who were paying an average of £34 an acre. The largest holdings were Hurst Farm, whose 700 a. included most of the farmland of the parish north of the village, and the combined Home Farm & Little Hill Farm, with 678 a. stretching from the village, through the former park down to the Ouse. The others were Mount Mill & Limes End (469 a. in two separate holdings, of which the latter was in Leckhampstead), Sparrow Lodge (299 a. to the south-east of the village), and Dagnall & Dovehouse (445 a. between Wicken and Deanshanger).
In the early 1980s the Society sold the house and buildings at Dovehouse Farm, which were redundant since the land was being worked from Dagnall, and in 1984 offered Wicken Road Farm, a smallholding of 22 a. let for £800, for sale by auction at a reserve of £104,000. The following year Mount Mill & Limes End (274 a.) was sold to the tenant. Continuing a policy of reducing its holding of agricultural estate, the Society accepted an offer from the tenants for the 709 a. of Home Farm & Little Hill in 1986, although one field on the edge of the village was retained, in the hope that planning permission for residential development might one day be obtained. These sales reduced the Society's estate to 1,877 a., let in 1992 for £101,500 gross. The remaining farms were Sparrow Lodge (302 a.), Hurst (702 a.) and Dagnall (442 a.), plus 141 a. of accommodation land at Pig & Whistle, near Hurst. Of these, Dagnall was sold in 1992.
In 1980 the Society's land steward described the overall standard of farm management at Wicken as good, with the tenant of Hurst Farm setting the pace. This was run on an allarable five-year rotation based on winter wheat, barley and oil seed rape, with spring break crops including sugar beet, peas, beans and linseed. The farm also had 60 breeding sows. The system depended on high inputs achieving high outputs, a large i