Great Marlow

Great Marlow parish covers the area to the north and west of Marlow. Several prehistoric artefacts have been found in the parish, such as Palaeolithic handaxes found in Dean’s Pit and Neolithic blades, flakes, scrapers and an axe found at Bluey’s Farm and Blount’s Farm. Bronze Age artefacts have also been found, mainly in the Thames, including a bone dagger found at Temple Lock. Several areas of prehistoric monuments have been identified, such as the ring-ditch at Home Copse and the Iron Age or Roman enclosures at Hook’s Farm known from cropmarks seen on aerial photographs. At Low Grounds Farm, Harleyford, Marlow Archaeology Society have been active in fieldwalking, doing geophysical survey and some excavation on the site of several ring-ditches, which may be the remains of a Bronze Age barrow cemetery. This is just within Marlow parish.

A few Roman artefacts have also been found, which include pottery sherds found during the construction of Harleyford Estate golf course, and metalwork found on Marlow Common and in the Thames, the latter being a billhook found opposite Bisham. Saxon metalwork has also been found in Thames at Temple Lock and Harleyford Manor.

There were several manors in the area that is now Great Marlow in the medieval period. These were centred at Barmoor, Harleyford and Widmer. The medieval manor house at Harleyford was replaced by a villa in the eighteenth century and there is a record of a chapel attached to the manor in the sixteenth century. Any medieval manor house at Widmere Farm was also replaced in the seventeenth to eighteenth century, but a thirteenth century chapel survives, now incorporated into the later farmhouse. This manor belonged to the Knights Hospitallers in the fourteenth century. Another manor is recorded, Seymour’s. It is only recorded from the sixteenth century but the manor house, Seymour Court, was where Henry VIII’s third wife Jane Seymour was born. Unfortunately the house was knocked down in the Civil War. There are also documentary references to a fishery, recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086, and of a village called Ackhampstead, which is recorded up until the nineteenth century and where there was also a chapel.

In the post-medieval period the area became more industrialised, with various mineral extraction pits, for instance in the Cressex Sports centre area and at Davenport Wood, Bencombe Farm and Red Barn Farm. There are also records of a pottery kiln somewhere in the parish in the eighteenth century, and by the nineteenth there was a pottery called Medmenham Pottery, where pot sherds have been found, and a brickworks at Newstone, Bovington Green.

Many of the listed buildings in the parish date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Harleyford Manor. The manor has formal gardens in which are several listed statues and garden temples, as well as an ice-house. Some are slightly older, such as Hill Farmhouse, which has an eighteenth century front, but there is a sixteenth to seventeenth century wing at the rear. Bluey’s and Cherry Tree Farm are both seventeenth century timber-framed buildings with later alterations. A workhouse was built in the eighteenth century but this has now been turned into four houses.

The more recent changes to the parish are connected with the two World Wars. A large system of First World War practice trenches was surveyed by Archaeology in Marlow in Pullingshill Wood, and there is also RAF Booker. This was originally a civil airfield but was requisitioned during the Second World War. Now it is used for recreational flying once again.