Monument record MBC47195 - WING LANDSCAPE [ORIGINALLY DEER] PARK

A late medieval and early post-medieval landscape (originally deer) park is visible on historic aerial photographs and remote sensing data and was mapped as part of the Aylesbury Vale Aerial Investigation and Mapping project (EBC18604). Located S of Wing village and centred at SP 88384 22009, Sir Robert Dormer inclosed Wing Park in the first half of the 16th century as an ornamental setting for his new mansion Ascott House and its large formal gardens. It is likely that elements of medieval Wing village were enclosed by the emparkment, which was abandoned as a consequence. The mapped park covers an area of about 1 square kilometre, bisected NNW-SSE by the Wing-Mentmore road. It extends to Wing Mill (The Old Mill), to the Wing-Aston Abbotts road in the NW and is bound on its S side by the brook that fed the mill. The former park is now mostly arable fields, centred within which the circular Wingpark Clump dominates the high point. From nearby place-name evidence, the original deer park boundary is likely to have extended westwards beyond the mapped area, with Oldpark Farm, circular Oldpark Spinney, Westpark and circular Westpark Clump. Across the former parkland are blocks of medieval ridge and furrow, plough headlands, furlong boundaries and former field boundary banks and ditches, presumably part of the medieval common open-field cultivation system pre-dating the early 16th century emparkment. These extend W beyond the borders of the park. Also scattered through the park are pits of various sizes, some of which may be ponds, but others are possibly post-medieval quarrying. Ascott House was badly damaged in the English Civil War period, after which it was abandoned, with the Royalist forces of Charles I encamped in the park in 1645. The enclosed park probably survived into the early 18th century, but in 1727 the deer were sold and the timber felled within the park. Still named and recorded as parkland on a late 18th century map, the 1813 the Ordnance Surveyors Drawing the 1880 dated 1st Edition OS map also then names the park and suggests its extent, notable for the lack of field boundaries within it. On aerial photographs taken in 2019 and recent remote sensing data, many of the smaller earthwork features have been plough levelled, though the larger extraction sites or ponds remain extant, though some have been somewhat infilled. No ridge and furrow cultivation, that were visible as earthworks on aerial photographs taken in the 1940s, appear to have survived post-war ploughing (1-8).