Take Care Lest We Blow Ur House Up

It was the darkest part of an early May night in 1883, most people had been asleep for hours and were hoping to sleep for many more. Without warning, an enormous explosion ripped through the eastern end of Priestgate. It was chance alone that no one was killed, such was the force. Local correspondence fed the story across the country, retelling it in detail. Paving slabs had been cracked in half or shattered, others had been flung into the air landing on the roofs of nearby properties. All the windows in the vicinity were smashed, including on Narrow (Bridge) Street, allowing the contents of the sewer – the focus of the explosion – to find their way into the buildings. This included the entire rat population of the sewer too.

It is still a mystery as to how the sewer came to explode, with the finger pointed at both coal gas and brewery gas mixing with the sewer and potentially a discarded cigarette. What is perhaps more intriguing is the story that did not make the national press but was reported in the local press – the locals thought the cathedral had been blown up.

Their fear was not due to the size of the explosion or indeed the location, but because a threat to blow up the cathedral had already been made by activists. According to a London paper, a letter had been received by Dean Perowne from the South of England Fenian Society, an Irish Republican group, which stated ‘Sir, Take care lest we blow ur house up. We have the dynamite ready.’ The police were quick to dismiss it as a hoax once they realised it had been sent from a neighbouring village, or so it was reported in the Aberdeen Evening Press.

It was curious that the story was difficult to find in the local press, but I finally found quite a different record in the Stamford Mercury. According to the Mercury the Dean had indeed received a letter, but the writing was so bad it was thought to have been written by a child and had been sent from Market Deeping. The house referred to was presumed to be the deanery (a fine building that would be a crime to destroy) and not the cathedral as stated.

However, despite the Mercury’s statement that the story had been grossly exaggerated and likely nothing more than a prank, the news rumbled on. The same paper reported a week later that Scotland Yard had informed the local police to take a thorough inspection of both the Post Office and the cathedral, perhaps in search of a bomb. Again, this was said to have been nothing more than a rumour, but it does at least tell you that it was on the minds of the local population. After such a fear that the city’s finest building would be destroyed, there was probably a sense of relief that the explosion was in the sewers, despite the stomach-churning clean-up necessary!

 

References

Aberdeen Evening Press, 5 April 1883, p.2.

Alleged Threat to Blow Up the Cathedral, Stamford Mercury, 6 April 1883, p.4.

Stamford Mercury, 13 April 1883, p.4.

Priestgate Explosion, Our Journey Peterborough, City Culture Peterborough

The image belongs to the author

 

Burghley's Medieval Holloway

Visiting Burghley Park is a joy for many people in the locality and a rite of passage for new Stamfordians. To have free access to pristine rolling pasture, an internationally-famous stately home and photo-worthy deer heard, is something that it's easy to take for granted. It's also easy to walk through the landscape without questioning the landscape you're walking through.

The Burghley landscape is different to the average street or village in Peterborough in that the landscape has been owned by one family for centuries, and every inch of the landscape has been carefully managed. There are benefits and issues with this, but the issues largely stem from the fact that it is private land, a fact that it is very easy to forget. The Burghley Estate is not obliged to share their most intimate past with us, the visitor, or indeed the wider history, for often large estates do not fare well in the story of the common man.

The first thing that you can notice if you enter Burghley Park by car from Barnack Road are the lumps and bumps of the overflow carpark. They're not obvious when parking under the trees, but you will almost certainly have driven over them if you've visited on a busy day. Those lumps and bumps are the remains of a medieval ridge and furrow field system that pre-dates Burghley House. Ridge and furrow marks crop up all over the place if you know where to look (shallow examples in Glebe Park in Market Deeping, or the A15 north of Glinton, for example) and you can see where previously ridge and furrow fields have been flattened to grow crops in some of the field marks. The marks revealed will depend on the weather conditions and the crops growing, but a stripy field is usually a good sign ridge and furrow was used to grow crops there. My favourite place to identify them is between Glinton and Northborough on the top of a Delaine bus, but for now, see if you can spot them in the picture at the bottom of the blog.

The evidence of ridge and furrow tells us people were farming the land before the Cecils arrived, but there are lots of other medieval features hidden in the landscape. I have searched for accessible documents listing some of the features on the site and have come away empty-handed. This is not unreasonable; research, archaeologists, historians etc. all cost money and could potential make the site more vulnerable to the dreaded night hawks. For this reason, I am not going to point out where some of the best features are and instead suggest you walk about the grounds (the pasture is much better than the paths) and question everything underfoot. You will find the remains of homesteads, plenty more ridge and furrow, a bridge, roads, and even an upstanding medieval cross. My favourite feature (at the moment) is a holloway that runs the entire length of the site and allows you to walk in the path of medieval locals.

We don't have many holloways locally, for the simple reason that they do not form on boggy fenland ground. Any others that once existed have likely been destroyed in the expansion of urban areas, so if you find one (for there are a few) count yourself lucky! I will hopefully highlight some of these in the future.

Burghley's holloway crosses the site from west to east and is very clear on satellite images of the site. The holloway starts at the most obscure entrance to the park, the little park gate at the end of Burghley Lane. If you choose to walk along the holloway (something I strongly recommend), then start at the Old Great North Road end of Burghley Lane and start walking east. You'll have joined a road that people were using hundreds of years ago, and one that had probably been used for hundreds of years, only ending when the Cecils expanded their lands. This was almost certainly a road that skirted the Cecil lands and would therefore have been the major route heading east from the arterial Great North Road.

What you'll notice as you walk is a dip in the ground characteristic of a holloway. As you continue to walk you will notice areas where the route creates a ditch or hollow and you can imagine the vast numbers of feet and hooves that have trodden their way through the landscape before you. What you'll also notice are other landscape features that seem to link up with the holloway in the same way that modern houses face roads and other smaller roads fan from them. You might notice features in and around the cricket club, including the remains of a medieval cross, a marker that would have indicated a meeting place for markets, religious gatherings, and other locatable events (there is another one on a footpath in Burghley Golf Club if you want to find another).

What you will certainly notice is that you cannot walk far until you find your progress blocked by a fence, but rather than feel annoyed at the fact you can't walk any further, be pleased at where you are. You have just arrived at a place in the landscape absolutely crammed with features. You won't fail to notice the land rising and the little stone quarry to the south of the holloway, but look to see if you can observe the lines of other roads, field boundaries, ditches, the remains of a bridge, and many more. Archaeological features are popping up in rabbit holes and under trees (please observe: don't touch) and you can really imagine the lives of people living and/or working there. This was almost certainly a little settlement that grew up around the quarry and the reason that some of the marks in the ground are deeper and archaeology a little more obvious, is due to the weight of the stone that was being moved around.

To follow the rest of the holloway, we have to use satellite images and maps. Both clearly show the gently curving line continuing through the park, which is marked by trees and bushes. This was once a boundary line, and the holloway may be deep in places, so that is not too surprising.

It continues across the park until it meets up with Barnack Road, continuing east as the modern B1443, arriving at Pilsgate after a short while. Anyone who has ever driven the road to Pilsgate will have noted the rather severe turn and steep hill into Pilsgate, but if you've been reading this whilst following the route on a map, you will have noticed that the road continues east to what is now The Dingle, or The Grange. It seems only sensible to assume that this was the original route of the road at one point, particularly as there is a disused quarry and spring there. The road could have joined up with the road heading from Uffington to Barnack, or followed a line indicated by lidar that seems to meet Barnack road just north of the allotments, close to more quarries.

As I have been writing this, the commonality of quarries has not escaped my notice, but it wasn't something I had previously considered. As a Peterborian I had always considered quarried stone from Barnack heading south, not north, not you must understand, because I didn't believe it went north but because of the large presence of Barnack stone in and around Peterborough that always filled the conversation. This holloway appears to connect the quarry of Barnack with another at Pilsgate Grange, and at least one (I believe there are others) at Burghley. The holloway I have indicated started from the arterial Great North Road and if you were transporting stone nearby in small amounts, this seems to be the route you would have taken. It avoided the steepest part of the road to Pilsgate (despite this road looking rather like a holloway) and then skirted around the Cecil-owned land until it reached the Great North Road. Obviously this isn't a great result for Pilsgate, as the road bypasses the hamlet, but perhaps this is one of the reasons why Barnack grew so well and Pilsgate is now reduced to very little.

As ever, more research is needed to tie up a few loose ends. But next time you get the chance to visit Burghley park, treat yourself to a few hundred years of history along the medieval holloway.

Was There a Deerpark in Westwood?

One of the things I love to do is to read old maps. In fact, if you ask me something related to a street in the centre of Peterborough the image I'm mentally walking through is of a Victorian map of the city - fun, yes, but not always helpful.

Old maps offer a view into the past that we don't get from more personal or legal accounts. They show us how features related to each other in the countryside, where paths and roads existed that do not now and how some modern features follow routes and lines that are centuries old (Frank Perkins Parkway I'm looking at you!).

The 1824-36 Cassini map of Peterborough takes a rather broad swipe at the district and does not have the beloved detail of later maps, but what it does allow us to do is to put Peterborough into context in the landscape. Peterborough appears small, which it was; it was an unremarkable market town on the fen edge with a rural rather than urban feel to it. In comparison, Whittlesea, only a few miles southeast, takes up a similar area to Peterborough on its almost fish-shaped island (check the map and see if you agree). The only building obvious to the untrained eye is, unsurprisingly, the cathedral, with other iconic buildings like the museum, Guildhall and St John's merged into rectangles or identified as inky boxes.

The eye quickly tires of Peterborough in such a large landscape and, thanks to the centring of the map, usually wanders west along the Nene. Thorpe Hall and its grounds take up a significant area, but this pales into comparison with its near neighbour Milton Hall and park, which could have successfully consumed Peterborough twice and still had space for Thorpe Park.

What you might notice about the outer edges of the Milton landscape is that it is irregular. Many old features in the landscape seem irregular, wobbly, or illogical and incongruous against modern straight roads (or indeed Roman roads), particularly when observed against the straight lines of (relatively) modern fenland fields. This irregularity makes the Westwood Farm landscape stand out further.

Westwood Farm is located directly east of Milton Park and north of Thorpe Hall on the map and is very easy to spot due to its almost hexagonal boundary shape. The hexagonal boundary is a solid wall of trees that, with an additional fence and/or bank, would have created a significant barrier around the land. There are four points of entry/exit from the land, with three of them linking directly to the farm. Thick boundary walls of trees were commonly associated with deer parks in the past and it's possible to identify the remains of Fotheringhay's tree boundary to the southwest on the same map to directly compare it with a known feature. So was Westwood Farm once a deer park?

One clue that this might once have been a deer park is the inner rectilinear shape within the boundary. The round-cornered rectangle identifies a ditch that would have ring-fenced the farm and any personal gardens or crops that the residents grew. This would have been necessary if the park land was indeed a deer park, because you wouldn't want to wake up to discover your entire cabbage crop has been eaten by your four-legged crop, or to discover them nibbling your best sheets when you hung them out to dry! The deer, or other animals, would have roamed the space between the tree boundary and the ditch, which sounds like a lovely life.

But let us just compare a few features. Firstly, the grounds of Westwood Farm are larger than Thorpe Hall and as large as the city of Peterborough, so this is a very significant space. Secondly, the boundary shape has quite neat and angular edges, suggesting that it could be more modern than the medieval deer parks of old, although the strange kink in the south-western side suggests features that have perhaps been lost over time. Thirdly, with Milton Park sitting so close, why would Westwood Farm have such a large deer park? Was the land owned by a competing landowner or rising nobility who wanted to prove his status by the building of an enormous deer park?

In order to create a medieval deerpark a landowner would need to gain a licence. Torpel Manor near Helpston had a licence for a deer park, as did Peterborough Abbey, Fotheringhay and Collyweston. Nearby King's Cliffe deer park was associated with a royal hunting lodge and Rockingham with the expansive forests used for royal hunting. The most famous deer park locally is Burghley because it still has a healthy deer herd, but we should not forget Milton deer park, also of Tudor origin and also with a present deer herd. In short, most, if not all of the deer parks locally had a royal or religious connection. So did Westwood have any connections?

Records in the National Archives show that Bishop Francis Dee lived at or owned Westwood in the 1630s and a item from the cloister was discovered in the farm's well, likely to have been placed there following the dissolution of Peterborough Abbey. Dee's wife Elizabeth (later Orme) spent many years seemingly fighting with the abbey over his will, including Westwood Farm.

One final observation can be made with the Cassini Map by comparing it with Bryant's Map of the County of Northamptonshire Surveyed 1824-26. This identifies the same features but does so in a different form. Milton Park's tree boundary is far greater than the Cassini map alludes to, covering the majority of the eastern side of the park - a small but interesting feature. What is very clear on Bryant's Map is that the parkland of Thorpe and Milton is marked with shading and Westwood is not; it is farmland. The clearest message are the words 'Westwood Plantation' to the west of the farm, a sure sign that the trees have been planted as a crop themselves, a crop that encircles the farm and the herd of animals within. This is also repeated across the county at Easton Lodge too, where a tightly rectangular tree bank borders the house there.

Westwood Farm was not a long-lost deer park, but it has had an interesting history, and does look very impressive on 200-year-old maps. Should you want to view Bryant's Map, contact Peterborough Archives and request a look at the map. The image below is from the Cassini map.