Footpath: Bretforton Road to Aldington

Click on the image above to see this path on the Worcestershire County Council GIS website with the digitised historical maps. Click on the image below to view the original enclosure map.

Photos taken 2006.

BRETFORTON ROAD, BADSEY, TO MILL LANE, ALDINGTON

Grid Reference: 065436 to 065441

This footpath, which is today a public right of way, is on land which was once part of Aldington. It did not feature on the 1807 Aldington Enclosure Map. It may have been because it passed over old enclosures, or it is possible that it came into use as a footpath from Badsey to Aldington early in the 19^th century when a mill was built on the west side of Badsey Brook. The 1883 Ordnance Survey map shows a path running due south from the sluice at the northern end of the Mill Pond. There were two crossing-points: one at the northern end of the Mill Pond (which was the one usually used by people coming from Badsey) and a foot-bridge slightly to the north. The footpath ran from the Mill House on Mill Lane, but this path was officially stopped up in the 1960s, and so access across the brook was then only by the more northern bridge.

During very cold winters, the mill-pond froze over. Arthur Savory, writing in his book, Grain and Chaff from an English Manor, said, "The winter of 1880-1881 was very severe, the mean temperature of January 1881 being 27.8°F, the coldest January since 1820. Ten years later, 1890-1891, another very prolonged winter occurred: the frost began on 6^th December and, with scarcely a break, continued till well into February…….. A ox was roasted whole on the Avon at Evesham and, when the frost broke up, the ice on our millpond was 17 inches thick." Elderly residents in the village today remember the winter of 1939, the coldest that century, when the mill-pond froze and people went skating. When the pond dried up in summer, it was possible to walk on the dry mud and go fishing in the stream. Today it is more of a bog or a marsh than a pond.

Here is a description of a walk along the path today. [LINK TO BE MADE AVAILABLE IN DUE COURSE.] The following paragraph gives an historical description of ownership of the land over which the path passes.

Aldington Map Z004

The path passes over land which, at the time of the 1807 Enclosure Act, was an old enclosure belonging to George Day. It was a long strip of land, amounting to 10a 1r 26p, to the east of Badsey Brook and to the west of an area known as the Hanging Grounds. It formed part of Aldington Farm which George Day had bought, together with the Brooke’s Farm estate, from Thomas Lord Foley in 1805 for £7,000. Aldington Farm had been in Lord Foley’s family for 140 years, an earlier Thomas Foley of Witley having bought "all that Manor of Aldington alias Aunton, and all that farm called Aunton Farm now in the tenure of William Jarrett, gentleman" in 1665. On 6^th October 1808, just two days after the Enclosure Awards, George Day sold this plot of land, together with all the estate bought from Lord Foley in 1805, to James Ashwin of Bretforton, for £12,000. Soon after acquiring the estate, James Ashwin set about re-establishing a mill in Aldington, but this time it was situated to the south of where a mill had existed in earlier centuries. The brook was diverted to form a mill-pond. The mill was certainly in existence by 1814, as deeds dated 1814 relating to a property on Village Street refer to the land being bounded by the Mill Pond on the east. The land remained in the Ashwin family until the latter part of the 20^th century. Whilst most of the Ashwin property was sold in the 1950s, the fields and meadows were not sold until after the death of the last Squire, Harry Ashwin, in 1983; the Wheatleys, as tenants, bought the land.