Buckland

Route of Akeman Street in BucklandThanks to the investigations undertaken for the Aston Clinton bypass, Buckland is known to contain several Iron Age and Roman features. Late prehistoric flint and Iron Age, Roman and medieval pottery has been found near both Buckland Wharf and Buckland Hoo in field-walking and metal-detecting. Iron Age, Roman and Saxon features and artefacts were found in geophysical survey, trial trenching and excavation on Site B of the Aston Clinton bypass excavations straddling the Lower Icknield Way. More Neolithic to Bronze Age flint, Iron Age pottery and Roman pottery, tile and quern fragments were found south of this site. A few monuments were known before this work. Three ring-ditches of possible Bronze Age date near Church Hill Farm are known from aerial photographs. Grim’s Ditch, probably an Iron Age cross-dyke, cuts through the parish, as does Roman Akeman Street, the modern A41. The oldest artefact, a Palaeolithic axe, was found in the early twentieth century near Lodge Farm.

 

Moat Farm moat in BucklandSome late Saxon and medieval pottery was found next to Dancer’s End Lane and there are records of a Saxon or Civil War cemetery near Dancer’s End Farm. Buckland village centre has earthworks of a medieval date that suggest that the settlement has been partly abandoned. A medieval moat is also known close to Moat Farm and a late medieval cruck-built barn, since converted into a house, is close to this. The oldest surviving building in the parish, however, is All Saints church which has a thirteenth century chancel, nave, aisle and font. It also has a Sheila Na Gig of the same date, a carved female figurine on the exterior of the church.

 

Some of the other buildings date to the sixteenth and seventeenth century, such as Moat Farm, but they are mainly eighteenth and nineteenth century in date. The School House was built in the nineteenth century as a school and master’s house in the Victorian drive for universal education, but is now a house and church hall. Dancer’s End House dates to the eighteenth century and has many ancillary buildings, such as barns, cowsheds, bullpens and even the boundary wall and railings are listed. The Pumping Station here is also nineteenth century. It was a waterworks and pumping station with a boiler house and provided accommodation for its workers along with workshops. The pond was later used as a swimming pool. There are also a number of limekilns located close to the pumping stations and a reservoir that probably all date to the nineteenth century. Two arms of the Grand Union Canal, the Aylesbury and the Wendover, also pass through Buckland and date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

 

More recent monuments are the site of a sausage skin factory in Lower Buckland and World War I practice trenches close to Buckland Wharf on aerial photographs.