They say Bolton Council is out to make them homeless — but is it a case of crossed wires gone horribly wrong?

The inspector arrived without prior warning. She picked her way down the curving path bordered by prickled hedges to Earls Farm, in Harwood, three miles out of Bolton town centre. There, she found the borough’s largest cattery, a long, low shelter lined with wire fences that has capacity for some 60 cats. Its owners, Karen and David Yates, came out as she approached. Her visit, the inspector said, “had nothing to do with what’s going on with the council”. That phrase might sound cryptic to you and me, but Karen and David knew exactly what she was talking about. 

For around 300 years, the Yates family has been renting this plot of land, which contains a house, some farm buildings and some adjoining fields — first from an earl, then a company, and then the council. But the past 20 years have threatened that very long tenure, and a few weeks ago, they faced eviction. When the family first contacted The Mill in early February, they told us that it was a story about “Tenant Farmers (300 years) being bullied by an aggressive Bolton Council.” Specifically, we were told that the council wanted to build social housing on the land, “demolishing our 500-year-old home in the process.” 

It sounded like an interesting tale, and perhaps even a clash between two worlds: one a rural way of life lived by the Yates family since long before the Industrial Revolution transformed these parts; the other, a local authority wielding its power to build the future and create exactly the kind of housing everyone has been calling for councils to provide: social homes. Whose side would readers end up cheering for? 

That’s not exactly the story I’ve found while looking into it. In fact, I’m left wondering whether the sad eviction of the Yateses from Earls Farm is the result of a series of misunderstandings, poor communication and sprinkling of bureaucratic ineptitude. Certainly, there is a lot of bad blood. That’s why Karen wasn’t buying what the animal welfare inspector had to say. “Clearly,” she says. “It was everything to do with what was going on with the council.”

The ancestral home

A few weeks ago, I made my own way down the curved path to Earls Farm, off the quaintly-named Stitch-mi-Lane. It’s an incongruous mix of cattery, cobblestones, farmhouses and tractor parts, set in a blotch of green hemmed in by the Breightmet housing estate and a state secondary school. Feral cats lounge beneath dead trees, a few chickens peck at the empty earth. A five minute walk away are rows of chippies, vape shops and disembowelled high street units; Bee Network buses getting cut up by mopeds. But on the farm it’s silent. 

David, who has dark hair and moody eyes, answered the door and led me through a small kitchen and into the sitting room. The couple’s cat, Blue, sat in front of a roaring fire and above it was a painting David had done. It depicts a stag that has been shot but eluded its hunter, only to later succumb to its injuries. Perched over it is an eagle looking back at the viewer without a hint of remorse about what it’s about to do. 

David doesn’t paint anymore. Everything that’s gone on with the council has taken up too much of his time and mind. “I’ve not painted for five years,” he said, looking up above the fire. “You need your head in that.” David is in his sixties and was born in the room we were sitting in. His family has lived in the house — the last remnant of a manor owned by the Earl of Derby — and farmed the surrounding land for about 300 years. His family members were amongst the first buried in the local cemetery. 

David isn’t sure precisely when his ancestor took over the farm, but he does know that the tenant before was a man named Greenhalgh: “He was a magistrate, obviously renting it from the Earl of Derby. And he left to go to Australia, y’know when they were sending the convicts to the colonies? So it became vacant, and that’s when Joseph Yates acquired it.”

We toured the house. The walls were dotted with photographs of David’s family and on the tablesides were drifts of paperwork relating to the couple’s ongoing legal wrangling. In the dining room, four photographs formed a diamond and David pointed to the top one, showing his great-great-grandfather in profile, looking stern, and quite like him. He is the member of the family with the most to do with his great-great-grandson’s current predicament. When the Earl of Derby offered him the chance to buy the property, he refused. “He was very, very wealthy,” David said as he and his ancestor on the wall squinted back at each other. “None of it makes sense.”

He refused to buy because the rent was so cheap it didn’t make sense to. Even now, the rent is an absolute steal: £500 a month for the house and its land, a peppercorn rent that has been renewed in the farm’s repeated tenancies over the years. For context, three-bedroom semis in Harwood are currently going for about £950 a month. The refusal meant the property and land was eventually sold on to a big corporate landowner in the ’50s, who sold it to the council in 1961, who have since, David tells me, “nibbled at it.” Joseph Yates started out with 160 acres of farmland; David is left with 12. 

He and Karen first met in the early 1990s. David had just got married and knew he had made a mistake, and not long after bumped into Karen while buying a bottle of wine. They saw each other around, and when David eventually got divorced, their paths crossed again and they got married in 2020. They both run the businesses on the site: baling hay for other farms and running the cattery, and Karen has a beauty studio too. It’s what makes the risk of eviction more frightening. “We’ll be made homeless and we’ll have no jobs,” Karen says. “David — all he has ever known is farming. It’s just crazy to wipe out our livelihood.” The added pressure of the legal battle has taken a toll on the couple. “We’re exhausted,” she says. “We just want it to stop.”