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.
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