Monument record MBC45190 - Medieval and/or post medieval ridge and furrow cultivation, Adstock parish.

Almost contiguous medieval and/or post medieval ridge and furrow cultivation, boundary ditches, trackways and furlong boundary banks, remnants of the former common open-field system, is visible on historic aerial photographs and remote sensing data as earthworks and was mapped as part of the North Buckinghamshire Aerial Investigation and Mapping project (EBC18304). Located across the parish of Adstock and centred at SP 74308 30837. Almost all the ridge and furrow cultivation blocks are visible as extant earthworks on aerial photographs taken in the 1940s but more recent arable land use in the north third of the parish has levelled most of the earthworks of ridge and furrow, furlong boundaries, trackways and plough headlands, especially those around Pilch Farm and Adstocks Fields Farm, although two fields close to the latter contain well preserved earthworks of a trackway and ridge and furrow, and a small parcel of woodland preserves more earthworks. In the south of the parish, closer to the village and along the A413, the land use is mainly pasture and equestrian and earthworks of the earlier ridge and furrow field systems can be seen underlying the field boundaries resulting from the 1798 inclosure of the parish and later changed to field boundaries. A long narrow strip from the centre of the village, in use as allotment gardens in the 1940s, has probably obscured the continuation of the earthworks across this area too. Early maps, field names and documents may shed more light on this. All of the ridges and furrows of these cultivation blocks are aligned generally SW-NE or NW-SE. The sections of linear earthwork furlong banks are part of a much more extensive system of land division boundaries that extends eastwards through Bedfordshire and beyond into Cambridgeshire. Whilst many of these features originate in the medieval period with the establishment of the common field cultivation system, some of the boundary banks may have earlier origins. They remain visible chiefly as extant, sinuous, parallel, plough-levelled earthwork sections on recent lidar remote sensing data. Whilst some of the linear banks respect the boundaries of the mapped ridge and cultivation blocks, others pass through the extant ridge and furrow, possibly indicating former medieval cultivation boundaries that were subsequently readjusted. (1-22)