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An Odd Story

There are nearly 200 farm attractions in the UK. Taplow's is 'leading the way in terms of innovation, quality and customer experience'. Odds Farm Park is 'Farm Attraction of the Year 2013', an accolade awarded annually by the National Farm Attractions Network.

Odds Farm banner

Jackie & Steve Vinden opened Odds Farm Park 20 years ago as a rare breeds centre. It has since evolved to employ about 50 people and to provide a unique mix of animal contact, education and leisure. The latest innovation is a giant indoor playbarn complete with cafe and espresso bar. Many local children have grown up not knowing what to do first – pet piglets, have a go at mini-golf, feed lambs, goats and rabbits, ride the tractor-train or dash past the duck pond to the adventure playground.

Birthday Party (Nigel Smales)

Jackie is the sixth generation of the House family at Odds Farm. Her great-times-four grandfather William House of Wooburn Common was a 'higgler' or 'general dealer' and tenant of five acres at Hodds Farm where his son Richard was born around 1852. Jackie's father Lionel House tells the tale that the land was owned by Portland Estates whose local manager offered Richard the chance to acquire and expand the farm in the 1890s. His elder sons Dick and Joe moved to Oxfordshire where in 1913 they started a successful motor bus company running services between Henley, Reading and their home in Watlington. Their brother Freddie and sister Annie (known as Dolly) took over Hodds Farm soon after the Great War. It passed in the early 1970s to Dick's son Arthur House. He was busy with the buses so he employed Lance Pithers to run what was by then a dilapidated dairy farm of 140 acres.

Steve & Jackie Vinden, Anne & Lionel House

Arthur was obliged to sell the bus company in the late 1980s and he persuaded Joe's grandson Lionel to take over Odds Farm in 1989. Lionel and his wife Anne sold their farm at Cublington in Aylesbury Vale and invested the proceeds in renovating the place. Dairy farming was no longer economic so they decided to breed beef cattle and offer bed-and-breakfast. However, further change was soon in the air. The seed was sown when the family visited friends who had a rare breeds farm in Pembrokeshire. Odds Farm Park now occupies half the land while Jackie's brother Derek farms the rest.

Nigel Smales

The Goat!