Bridleway
32
Distance
1,050m. Direction: N – S, NNW – SSW
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Bridleway 32 runs north – south across the
plateau of the Cambridge Greensand, down the ridge onto Biggleswade Common. It
starts at 66 m. above sea level, one of the highest points on the ridge, at the entrance to the RSPB
Headquarters on the A1042 Potton Road (TL 191485) between Sandy and Potton. It
is the continuation of the Short Riding, the bridleway on the opposite side of
the road, which leads to the Everton Road and the Pym’s Hazells estate.
As
one enters the grounds you will see Swiss Cottage, the entrance lodge, to the
east. Its history is related later but now forms the Visitors Centre, shop
(open weekdays 9 am – 5 pm and weekends 10 am – 5 pm), toilets and offices. A
large car park is located in the trees immediately to the south. The shop sells
a variety of bird-related gifts, soft-drinks and ice-creams. Brochures with
details of some wonderful woodland and heathland walks are available inside and
a notice board indicates which birds have been spotted recently for those
ornithologists amongst you. More than 30 birds regularly breed on the estate.
As RSPB staff and visitors use the road, you need to be careful walking along
the bridleway. Dogs need to be kept on a lead and are not allowed on the other
footpaths around the estate.
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Adult entrance
tickets in 2006 were £3, children’s £1; concessions £1.50 and a family £6. RSPB
members get free admission. However, if you argue that you are only planning to
use the bridleway, you can get in without charge, The Nature Reserve is open every day from dawn till
dusk. Apart from Christmas Day and Boxing Day, the Visitors Centre is open all
year, Monday to Fridays between 0900 and 1700, On Saturdays and Sundays it is
open from 1000 till 1700. It is definitely worth a visit if you are passing and
are interested in birds.
Bridleway
32 forms part of the Skylark Ride, East Bedfordshire’s 36 km circular horse
ride from Sutton, through Wrestlingworth, across Biggleswade Common, up through
Sandy Warren to join the Roman Road here. So, if you don’t meet up with any
horse riders, you will see plenty of evidence of horses’ hooves in the mud
along the way.
Further
down the road, about 100 metres past the hut, a footpath has been created
alongside it. It continues through the woods for about 500 metres with views to
the west to open grassland, a man-made lake and a bird watching hide.
Archaeological evidence of human settlement on the top of the Greensand Ridge
suggests there were people living here about 10,000 years ago. A small
enclosure with a circular mound dating to around 300 BC is thought to be a
single family’s hill fort, the mound may have had a wooden wall to keep out
wild animals like bears and wolves. In the side of one of the earth banks the
ancient burrows of two sand martins were found.
By
the 13th century this area was known as Sandy Warren. The sandy
hills provided valuable nesting and grazing sites for rabbits which, in
Medieval times, were a valuable source of meat and fur. It was owned by William de Beauchamp.
Whether it was William (1185 – 1260), the Chancellor of the Exchequer or his
son William, (1237 – 1298), the 9th Earl of Warwick, is uncertain. Maybe they
both owned it. The Beauchamps owned lots of land in Bedfordshire and elsewhere.
The
adjoining estate to the north belonged to the Pym family in the 18th
century. Humphry Repton was called in to landscape the park. In his Red Book,
a prized family possession, he described, the area as “...rough windswept country. After ascending the naked hills from the
village of Sandy the eye is disgusted by the vast expanse of flat uninteresting
rabbit warren.“. When
John Byng visited the Pym family’s estate at Hasells Hall in 1794 he wrote that
the villagers at the foot of the hill (Stratford), survived with “a little
rabbit plunder.” This estate of
heath and open woodland was bought in about 1850 as a country retreat for
Captain William Peel, the third son of Robert Peel, the Prime Minister of Great
Britain and founder of the Police Force.
The
gate house, known as the ‘Swiss Cottage’, was built for William in 1851 where
he convalesced after catching river fever in Africa. As a captain in the Royal
Navy, he gained a Victoria Cross during the Crimean Wars in 1854 and was
honoured with the title of Knight Commander of the British Empire for helping
put down a Mutiny in India. He was injured in Lucknow and died from smallpox in
1858 before he could see his plans for the Sandy estate realized. He was
responsible for building the railway from Sandy to Potton which used to run
along the foot of the southern face of the Greensand Ridge into the valley that
drained into Biggleswade Common. The plan was to take advantage of the market
gardening land in Sandy, Potton and Gamlingay and supply the increasing demand
for food from the urban centers, especially London. It was completed in June 1857, and officially opened
by Lady Peel. The first train consisted of a locomotive, called
"Shannon", named after Peel’s frigate and built by George England at
a cost of £800. It was able to haul two passenger carriages, a goods wagon and
a brake van. Within seven years it and a second locomotive, "Little
England", were hauling coprolites extracted from Sandy Heath to Sandy
station. These were thought by some at the time to be the fossilized droppings
of dinosaurs, fish and other organisms. Details can be found in the account of Bridleway 29 – the Long Riding.
The
estate passed to his younger brother, Arthur Wellesley Peel, MP, who lived in
Swiss Cottage. In 1864 he had tests done on Sandy Heath to determine whether
the iron found in the Greensand under his estate was of sufficient quality to
deserve mining. It wasn’t but the fossil deposit beneath it proved a lucrative
source of mineral wealth. A bed of what the Victorian geologists termed
phosphatic nodules, thought by others to be the fossilized dung of dinosaurs,
lizards, bears, fish and even wildebeests, was located a few feet below the
surface. Ground to a powder and dissolved in sulphuric acid, it was the raw
material much in demand in the second half of the 19th century in
the manufacture of superphosphate – the world’s first artificial chemical
fertilizer. Several contractors made agreements with Peel to raise the fossils,
paying up to £3 a ton royalty. When several hundred tons could be raised per
acre and many hundreds of acres were worked between Sandy, Everton and Potton,
it proved a very profitable reserve to have discovered on your property.
Average royalties during the coprolite period were just over £100 an acre. As
many hundreds of acres were worked between Sandy and Potton, Peel must have
realized a fortune between 1865 and the 1890s when the industry petered
out.
Over
the years he helped develop the town of Sandy. He was elected Liberal MP in
1865. Along with rents from his estate he could afford to build a country
house. In 1870 work started on a design by Henry Clutton, the architect who, two years later, designed Old
Warden Park for the Shuttleworth family. He also designed a number of estate
churches for the Duke of Bedford. The lowest tender was £6,695. To hide the
Tudor-style house from the road the park was planted
with pine trees with a 700 metre-long drive. Formal gardens were laid out, with
a wide variety of trees, including sweet chestnuts, weeping birch, and majestic
cedars. Peel tried to get permission from the local authorities in the 1860s to
divert the public bridleway than ran north-south through his estate but they
refused. An extensive tree-planting scheme was undertaken with mostly pines and
conifers but some oak and birch. Closer to the house exotic plants like the
strawberry tree (the UK’s biggest and oldest) and Atlas cedar were planted.
By
1873 he was parliamentary secretary of the Poor Law Board and from 1871,
secretary to the Board of Trade. Between 1884 and 1895 he was Speaker of the
House of Commons. When he retired in 1895 he was appointed Viscount Peel and
the following year chaired a Parliamentary Committee investigating licensing
laws. Many of his proposals are till in place today. As the local landowner he
had a number of farms built along Stratford Road, which runs alongside the
railway line, and on the estate further east including Cottage farm and Warren
Farm. As well as building estate cottages for his tenants he was instrumental
in building a gas works near Sandy
Railway station and providing the town with gas lighting. When he died the gas
works were sold to a group of local businessmen who formed the Sandy Gas Company.
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During
the First World War the Lodge was rented out to a
family who kept chickens on the front lawn. To increase the estate’s income, in
1914 large parts of the heathland were burnt to create market gardening land.
This reduced the habitat of many wildlife species including nightingale,
nightjars, lizards, natterjack toads and glow worms. A local resident protested
to the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves that “whilst I write,
bonfires of heather and undergrowth are burning vigorously.”
Following
the depression of the 1930s the estate was sold to Sir Malcolm Stewart and his
wife in 1934. He was the chairman of the London Brick Company and the
Bedfordshire workings at Stewartby were named after his father, Sir Halley
Stewart. The family’s wealth was used to create many of the Italian-style
formal gardens around the house. As a keen swimmer Sir Malcolm had a 50-metre
long pool built on the south
terrace. His wife preferred it as a fishpond with ornamental waterfowl and a
story has it that he was chased across the pond by mandarin ducks. Nowadays the
pool teems with huge carp. The walls of the two small gardens were constructed
in the 1930s. On the western side was a water garden; on the east a rose
garden. The Kitchen gardens erected in the 1870s were accessed through the
water gardens. The walls are now covered with mature wisteria and clematis.
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When the Second World War broke out part of
the estate was requisitioned. It was taken over by the 84th Command,
a gentler posting after helping defeat Rommel’s troops in North Africa. The
main drive – Bridleway 32 – was concreted and lined with corrugated iron
shelters filled with wooden boxes of high explosives. Other sheds in the woods
housed poisonous gases. A narrow gauge railway helped carry heavy goods to
various stores. It is claimed that most of the woods in this area were used for
storing ammunition. Part of the estate to the east in Deepdale was used as an
aviation fuel depot with a siding created beside the Cambridge – Oxford
railway. In places concrete loading platforms can still to be seen. One remains
on the south side of the Everton-Sandy
Road not far from the top of the hill. Some evidence of the pre-fabricated
buildings remains in these woods.
There were a
number of air crashes in the Sandy area, some close to the railway. On 2nd June, 1943 (???) a Halifax LK284, ‘J for
Johnny’, piloted by F/L Hugh Stiles DFC of 138 Squadron, REAF Tempsford, took
off for Belgium on operation TYBOLT 29. He lost his port inner engine at a
height of only 100 ft (30 m) and came down three minutes later near Sandy
Hills, landing it skillfully in the fields behind Sandy Lodge. Counterfeit
coins were reported found scattered everywhere. The aircraft caught fire. He
and P/O Bryant escaped unhurt but P/O Casey was slightly injured. Three other
crew members suffered fractures and one a dislocated shoulder.
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When Sir Malcolm Stewart died in 1951 he
bequeathed the contents of the house on his wife’s death to the National Trust.
When she died in May 1960 the estate, house and contents were put up for
auction. At the bequest of Sir Malcolm some furniture, paintings (including
some by Romney and Reynolds),
tapestries, statues and other household effects, worth about £100,000, were
transferred to Montacute House, a National Trust property in Somerset. At the
two-day auction the remaining treasures, including other paintings by Constable
and Gainsborough, other tapestries, furniture and object d’art, bedroom and
other household furnishing from the mansion and the domestic wing were sold.
Even the garden statuary, a cast-iron cannon brought back from one of the
Peel’s military campaigns, stone seats and stone and wooden urns went to the
highest bidder.
The
Lodge and forty hectares of the estate were purchased by the
RSPB for £25,000 and used as its Headquarters.
At that time its membership was about 10,500 compared to over a million today.
Its mission statement as a UK charity is ‘working
to secure a healthy environment for birds and wildlife, helping to create a
better world for us all.’ It administers a plot of
woodlands and sandy heath with trails and wheelchair access to hides for bird
and animal observation. The ground floor of the Lodge was used for offices with
staff accommodation upstairs. New offices were built nearby including a mock
Tudor imitation of the original building in Bedfordshire brick and
reconstituted stone. Built in 1996, this building has won environmental awards
for its energy-saving devices and use of recycled materials. You will
occasionally hear the hours and quarters chimed from the clocktower in the
stable block.
The
107 acre nature reserve around the mansion is organically maintained and the
Henry Doubleday Research Association (Ltd) wildlife garden demonstrates
effective organic cultivation. The tranquil memorial garden commemorates the
generosity of people whose legacies have helped the RSPB. The open area to the
north of the Lodge was the original grazing meadow and is a designated SSSI
(Site of Special Scientific Interest) important for its flora and
invertebrates. Part of the heathland is the east has been designated an SSSI.
You
will notice that there has been quite large-scale tree felling on both sides of
the bridleway. Following the purchase in 2003 of the 100-hectare woodlands
around Redstone Hill to the west and 150-acre tracts of woodland stretching to
the east towards Deepdale, the estate now more resembles the extent it was
before 1960. Conservation management plans were put in place to improve and
extend the heathland and acid grassland. In winter 2005 many of the trees were
cut down, the timber sold and the branches and twigs mulched. Some of the leaf
litter was removed and within a few months some of the seeds from the old
plants had geminated. Some gorses and heathers have been introduced. The aim is
to attract the natterjack toads and provide potential habitat for breeding
birds such as woodlarks and nightjars. The woodland and bracken slopes are
being managed to encourage flora, fungi and typical woodland birds.
Visiting in Spring you can see snowdrops and bluebells on the woodland
floor, woodpeckers drumming and calling in the trees, flowering azaleas and
rhododendrons and songbirds establishing territories. In Summer there are
dragonflies hovering over ponds and bats flitting around the buildings. The
wisteria is in blossom on the Lodge walls; colourful flowers and butterflies
can be seen on the herbaceous borders and lizards and grass snakes on the
heath. In Autumn magnificent displays of purple heather can be seen on the
hillside, a variety of fungi can be spotted in the woods and birds of prey
hovering and swooping over the heath. During the Winter there are bright
berries on the evergreen shrubs, redwings and thrushes feeding on them, flocks
of tits and nuthatches on the feeders and, following snowfalls, tracks or birds
and animals.
43,000 visitors were attracted to the centre in
1998. latest figures? A number of way-marked
footpaths have been created through the woods but the bridleway leaves the road
where it turns to the southwest towards the Lodge (TL 191480). It then follows
a gentle slope down a valley cut through the greensand by glacial meltwater
through the pine trees until it leaves the estate at its south gate (TL
192487). You might notice that the base of the bridleway is made up of brick
rubble, thought to have been brought up from the bombed out parts of London and
dumped during the Second World War. Rain erosion, walkers’ feet and horses’
hooves have eroded the bridleway in parts and there are plans to have it
restored using local ironstone, a by-product of the sand pits still operating
on Sandy Heath.
Once
you leave the woods through the local ironstone gateway (192476) you meet
Bridleway 42 which runs E –W along the southern edge of the estate. In the 19th
century it was called the Hunting Gate through which the members of the local
gentry would enter Sandy Warren to join the hunting parties to catch rabbits and
hares. West takes you to the Stratford Road and Sandy Station. Bridleway 33
takes you south via Bridleway 9 across Biggleswade Common, past Furzenhall Farm
and on to Biggleswade. The sandy runoff from the hills has accumulated as a
broad swathe over the northern edge of Biggleswade Common. Under it lies many
hundreds of feet of Oxford Clay which dates back to about 500 million years ago
when this area formed the NW coast of what geologists call the ‘London-Brabant
platform’.
Geology of the Greensand Ridge