Monument record 0802800000 - N of Akely Wood

Aerial photograph taken in June 1990 shows the post-med field boundary where the field sizes from the OS 1st edition have been modified. Plus narrow linear features which appear to create 3 rectinlear enclosures abutting a curving field boundary with a seond well-defined ditch joining from the east (1).

A section of post-medieval roadway is visible on historic aerial photographs as cropmarks and was mapped as part of the North Buckinghamshire Aerial Investigation and Mapping project (EBC18304). Located in a field immediately E of Akeley Wood about 220 metres N of Coppice Farm and centred at SP 69436 38073, two parallel ditches extend N from Akeley Wood about 234 metres. A slightly curving ditch about 1.5 metres wide extends N-S for about 196 metres. Running parallel and some 18 metres to the E is a shorter section of linear ditch about 1.5 metres wide that extends N-S about 102 metres. Two parallel sections of ditch about 29 metres apart are up to 2.5 metres wide and about 22 and 66 metres long, aligned WSW-ENE. Of uncertain date and function, they bisect the trackway in two places. A small circular pit of uncertain date and function is about 3 metres in diameter and may be a tree throw. The ditches match the course of a wide trackway or road depicted on the 1814 Ordnance Surveyor’s Drawing leading from the edge of what was then a much larger woodland called Stockholt Wood. The road curves through this extensive woodland to access two buildings in the middle of Stockholt Wood that are identified as Akeleywood House on the 1881 OS 1st Edition map, which by that time stood in the fields seen today as Stockholt Wood had been reduced in size and renamed Akeley Wood in the intervening years. Akeleywood House is now entirely demolished but the cropmarks lead directly to the site of the former buildings (2-4).