Landscape record 0020402000 - Aston Clinton Park and House

A number of parkland features shown on the 1st edition 6" OS map still remain, although many have now gone. Field fences and sports grounds etc have been superimposed onto the original landscape. Ornamental trees near house, however there are no details of any visible gardens on recent APs (B7).
The remains of a mid‐late C19 garden and park for a lost country house, forming an early element of a unique cluster of seven flamboyant C19 Rothschild country house landscapes in Buckinghamshire/ Hertfordshire (the closest comparable of which are nearby Halton House and Tring Park). The design incorporates features from previous C18/C19 design phases and a canal, with mid‐C19 buildings by Stokes and Devey (who both worked on nearby Rothschild sites) and extensive mature ornamental tree planting. The 75 ha. Site is contiguous with adjacent Halton House, also for the Rothschild family. Although many features and much woody planting survives including parkland, losses and change have been sustained in the C20, including during the 1960s adaptation to a training centre, included most notably the replacement of the lost mansion with a large recreational building, and residential development around the northern periphery. See report for detail (B9).

A probable deserted settlement with ridge and furrow field systems and trackways of medieval/post medieval/post medieval date are visible on historic aerial photographs and remote sensing data as extant earthworks and were mapped as part of the Aylesbury Vale Aerial Investigation and Mapping project (EBC18604). Located in parkland at Aston Clinton Park, Aston Clinton, and centred at SP 88179 11435. The area covered in this record covers all the parkland for Aston Clinton House which was created in the 18th century when the earlier manor house and moat were still in existence south of the Church (see MBC6588). These were cleared in the late 19th century to make way for a kitchen garden for the later house and lidar visualisations show the area has been levelled by modern land use. The new house constructed in the early 19th century is no longer standing, demolished in the mid 20th century. Remains of the formal gardens were mapped close to where the house stood. During World War II this house was used as the headquarters for EKCO, a company that made short wave radios, used to listen to German radio transmissions, based in Southend, to ensure it was safe from bombing raids.
The earthworks mapped are patches of ridge and furrow field systems, crossed by trackways, and former field boundaries where no ridge and furrow was mapped. When compared with a georeferenced image of the 1814 pre-inclosure map the banks and ditches coincide with former field boundaries and routeways that are shown this map. There is a reference to a road being stopped up in 1785 probably for the construction of the new house (where). It is not clear which road this was and any trace of this may have been removed by the construction of that house. The earthworks are not clearly or easily recognisable as former settlement, but neither are they clearly identifiable as anything else from the sources available to this project. The Ordnance Surveyors drawing of Aylesbury (1813-14) shows Aston Mill on a watercourse within the parkland and a building can be seen on the pre-inclosure map on the same site. No sign of this building was visible on any aerial photographs as the area was wooded in the 1940s and modern land use is grass/playing field. A subrectangular pond approximately 170m south of the site of the mill was also visible on the 1814 map and mapped as an earthwork
The house was demolished in 1956 and then the estate was purchased by Buckinghamshire County Council and converted to a training centre and this land use continues. (12-22)