Chenies

A Lower to Middle Palaeolithic handaxe was found somewhere in the parish, but is not well-provenanced. Some more Palaeolithic flint flakes and later, Neolithic and Early Bronze Age flint arrowhead, scrapers and flakes were found near Mount Wood. There seems to have been a small Mesolithic presence in Chenies, close to the River Chess. A Mesolithic flint scatter was found on the north side of the River Chess. A Mesolithic tranchet axe-head was found in the garden on Whitelands Avenue, suggesting that Mesolithic people did stray a little distance from rivers from time to time.

There are two Iron Age to Roman sites in Chenies parish. One is Latimer villa, which has been excavated several times since the nineteenth century. Excavations in the 1960s uncovered a villa of the simple corridor type and many Roman artefacts that was built after a Late Iron Age rectangular house. After the villa went out of use another settlement grew up in the Late Roman period. More Roman material has been found at Latimer Park Farm more recently. The other Late Iron Age to Roman farmstead has been identified in Mount Wood. Iron Age and Roman artefacts suggest a long settlement period. Possible corn-drying kilns have also been found. Three Roman roads are thought to pass through the parish.

The medieval period is represented by Chenies Manor House, which incorporates the oldest standing remains in the parish. The house is mainly fifteenth and sixteenth century in date and much was pulled down in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but there is a fourteenth century undercroft or cellar. St Michael’s church is in the manor house grounds and dates to the fifteenth century with some sixteenth century additions. There are lots of monuments to the Russell family, the Earls of Bedford, inside the church. Also in the grounds is a sixteenth century banqueting house that is now known as the Nursery. A fifteenth century well was excavated and various finds such as wooden bowls, lead shot, cowbells and clay pipes were found inside. There are fourteenth century records of two deer parks attached to Chenies Manor and there is a fifteenth to sixteenth century hunting lodge at Lodge Farm, but the parks were disparked in the seventeenth century.

Several mills are known from historical records. Latimer Mill was recorded as a fulling (cloth processing) and a corn-mill in fourteenth century documents and is recorded as having been demolished in the eighteenth century. Chenies Mill is recorded as being a fulling mill as well in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was a paper mill. The nineteenth century millhouse still survives.

There seems to have been a small hamlet at Flaunden and there are still a few remains of the thirteenth century St Mary Magdalen's church but it seems the church and hamlet were abandoned in the nineteenth century, though some houses are still recorded in the area on nineteenth century maps.

Many of the listed houses in Chenies date to the nineteenth century, such as the Red Lion Inn and Banner’s Rest. Chenies Place, also nineteenth century, has some interesting garden buildings, such as a sundial, pergola and two bridges. The formal garden at Chenies Manor is also nineteenth century, but is on the site of earlier gardens. Only a few buildings date to the seventeenth century, such as the Almshouses that were built by the Countess of Warwick, or Great Greenstreet Farm. Liberty House is eighteenth century and built by the founder of Liberty’s of London.