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.
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