Great Brickhill

Several crop-marks have been seen on aerial photographs but cannot be dated, such as ditches near Eaton Leys and enclosures near Great Firs Wood and Galleylane Spinney. Some Neolithic to Bronze Age ring-ditches have also been identified on aerial photographs and may be related to the finds of skulls in the nineteenth century. There is also a good deal of Roman material form Great Brickhill. An early Roman cremation cemetery was found at Holts Green and a Roman burial was found on the banks of the River Ouzel. Metalling for a Roman road and Roman ditches and walls were found at Three Locks golf course, along with a Saxon boundary ditch.

Great Brickhill manor house had two watermills in the Domesday Book and was known to have fishponds by the fourteenth century and a deer park in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The medieval house was replaced by a nineteenth century house that itself was demolished in 1935. The medieval hollow-way, Jack Ironcaps Lane, seems to have been the site of a pottery industry with several fourteenth to fifteenth century kilns uncovered. Paper Mill Farm, though a paper mill in the eighteenth century, has records of a mill going back to the thirteenth century.

The oldest building is St Mary’s church with a thirteenth century chancel and tower and a fourteenth to fifteenth century nave. One of the residential buildings, 12 Stoke Lane, may date back to the fifteenth century. There are historic records of a chapel at Maiden’s Well in the sixteenth century and of a watermill at Orchard Mill from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.

Most of the other listed buildings date from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Most of the nineteenth century remains are industrial and recorded on maps, such as the gravel pit at Pound Hill, sand pits at Rectory Farm, The Moors and Partridge Hill and a coprolite quarry at Galley Lane Farm. The fishpond at Fishpond Spinney is also nineteenth century in date.