Fingest and Lane End

A Mesolithic site was found at Marline’s Pit in Bolter End. Mesolithic flint artefacts such as awls, blades, burins, cores, scrapers, a point, flakes and other debitage were found during sand extraction.

There is a great deal of Roman material in Fingest and Lane End parish. Several coins have been found in gardens at Cadmore End, Wheeler End Common and Fingest House. Roman pottery has also been ploughed up near Manor Farm and pottery and tile were found in a pit during a watching brief at Fryer’s Farm. A Roman pot containing a cremation was also found north of St Bartholomew’s church in 1937 during ground levelling.

A Viking style mount was found in a metal-detecting survey at Hangar Farm, suggesting that someone from Scandinavia may have been living there, or that Scandinavian artistic styles (in this case known as ringerike) had influenced the local craftsmen.

There are eleventh (in the Domesday Book) to nineteenth century records of Ackhampstead, a village that is now abandoned. All that can be seen are a few levelled platforms at Moor Farm where houses were. The oldest standing building in the parish is St Bartholomew’s church in Fingest, which has a twelfth century tower and nave, a thirteenth century chancel and was restored and changed a little in the nineteenth century. Parts of the old Fingest manor, medieval roof tiles, were found when digging on the site. The manor also had its own deer park, as known from fourteenth century records. There was another deer park in Fingest and Lane End parish, known as Widdenton Park. There are records dating back to the fourteenth century and the park pale, the boundary bank, has been found in a field survey.

A thirteenth to fourteenth century pottery kiln was identified on Cadmore End Common during a watching brief in advance of bypass construction. There are also records of eighteenth to nineteenth century brickworks in the area, which were closed in the early twentieth century. Some of the remaining buildings were converted into houses. Three stones were set up at Cadmore End as a marker of the boundary between Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, which was further east than it is today.

Most of the listed buildings in the various settlements in this parish, Fingest, Bolter End, Cadmore End, are seventeenth to eighteenth century and many are timber-framed. The houses in Lane End, however, tend to be eighteenth to nineteenth century, reflecting a more recent prosperity. Holy Trinity Church in Lane End is also nineteenth century and on the site of an earlier church. The area was important in brick and tile manufacture in these centuries, and kilns were known at Bolter End, Lane End and Cadmore End (as mentioned above). In fact, Kiln Cottage in Cadmore End was a kiln foreman’s cottage.