I have lived in Sunninghill, Berkshire, for 41 years since Jan and I returned from a few years in Washington, DC. I am now one of a small group of volunteers that organizes events at our village public library. Last October a neighbour, Professor Mick Crawley, a botanist and ecologist, took a group of us on an enthralling tour of our own village. I discovered how many things I had failed to notice about our local environment over the last four decades.
Mick is the author of the definitive study of Berkshire’s plants and ecology, in which he notes that “The modern village of Sunninghill is a working class enclave surrounded by the houses of the very wealthy. The little brick-built semi-detached houses were mostly erected between 1890 and 1914, as the population soared following the coming of the Southern Electric Railway.”[i] He might have added that there were also a few former woodmen’s cottages (small single-storey bungalows) here and there, which have been gradually succumbing to development and demolition in recent years. A curious feature of Sunninghill is that its church is not in the centre of the village, as one would expect, but in a rather out-of-the-way location in Church Lane, accompanied only by a few luxurious homes, on the other side of the busy A329 London Road. Mick explains that “Old Sunninghill, in contrast, was an ancient, pre-Norman settlement on the rounded hill tops surrounding the parish church at Ashurst, in what is now Silwood Park. Of these early cottages, no trace remains and most of them were ruthlessly cleared out when the estates were gentrified in the eighteenth century.”[ii]
We learned more of this history[iii] from our last library event before the autumn on 26 May when Mick led a tour of the grounds of Silwood Park. Silwood is now Imperial College London’s research centre for ecology, evolution and conservation. The campus, on the outskirts of Sunninghill, is a 20-minute walk from our home. Much of Mick’s talk, of course, was about botany and ecology, but he also explained to us that the design of the park’s landscape, and of our own community, reflects the geography of the powerful and of those who lacked power.
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| Our tour of Silwood Park |
Mesolithic flint axes tell us that farmers lived in our area about 10,000 years ago, and cream-coloured flint axes provide evidence of Neolithic farmers some 5,000 years ago. Bronze Age bell barrow burials have been excavated near Sunningdale station and there were similar barrows at Heatherwood Hospital in Ascot. Belgic tribes, the Atrebates, settled the area about 50 BC, and an appeal for help from an Atrebatic king prompted the Roman Emperor Claudius to invade Britain in AD 43. Although a Roman road runs 2km to the south of Silwood through what is now Heathrow Airport, Egham, Sunningdale and on to Silchester. No Roman remains have been found around Sunninghill, because “This was sandy infertile heathland passed through only for necessity, and there was nothing to induce human beings to remain in Roman times.”[iv]
Some time between the departure of the Romans in AD 410 and the Norman Conquest a tiny Saxon hamlet existed on a hilltop in Nash’s Fields, now part of Silwood Park. The occupants were members of the Sunna or Sonna people, from whom Sunninghill (and its neighbour Sunningdale) derives its name. Silwood derives from “siele”, Old English for willow. From the 10th century, the farmers of Nash’s Field were engulfed in the hunting forest of Christian Saxon Kings, who had a palace at Old Windsor.
The first church was established about 890. An ancient yew tree in the grounds of the current church is at least 1,000 years old and may have marked the site of a pagan shrine. The pre-Norman church was replaced by a stone building between 1120 and 1130[v], in the centre of glebe lands, given from the lands of the royal forest to sustain the vicar. By this time, the King’s hunting forest was fiercely policed by the keepers to prevent humble folk from hunting the monarch’s wild boar and deer. The residents of Nash’s field may well have worked for the King as deer keepers, kennel men, foresters or as some other kind of estate worker. Oak from Sunninghill was used to build Windsor Castle, St. George’s Chapel and Eton College.
By 1362 Sunninghill was a manor owned by a character called John de Sunninghill whose property included a manor house, farmland and woodland and a few cottages. A deed of 1582 calls the manor house Eastmore (“east of the moor of Ascot heath”), located on high ground above Silwood Farm (the farm house, part Tudor and part hideous modern, is still there). A succession of owners cultivated small arable fields, exploited the woodland and grazed sheep on meadowland. In the 1670s the manor land and Silwood Farm were acquired by the Aldridge family, who made their money from timber, leather and farming during the Civil War. The family owned the estate for about a century, during which it leased the land to tenants, while the Aldridges devoted themselves to more profitable enterprises.
Wealthy and powerful as the Ashridges were, Sunninghill offered no greater opportunities than it had in Roman times, but then in 1711 Queen Anne introduced horse racing to Ascot Heath. Ascot and Sunninghill suddenly became a fashionable destination. The wealthy were further attracted by the “health-giving springs” at the Wells, originally a farmhouse, but by the 17th century an inn. With the advent of horse racing, the Wells, which combined health-giving waters with a strategic location by the start of the races, became a fashionable and luxurious destination.
The place once shunned by Romans now attracted the rich and famous, and was a desirable place to own a grand home, preferably without the humble farmers who had toiled there for centuries. One such was a wealthy banker, Sir James Sibbald, who purchased Silwood in 1787. In 1795 he built Silwood Park, a white Georgian residence designed by the Scottish architect Robert Mitchell (fl.1770-1809). To provide the ideal setting for his new home Sibbald commissioned the landscape architect Humphry Repton to design an elegant landscape for his new home, including an artificial lake.
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| Sibbald's mansion |
Sibbald lost no time in ensuring that he could enjoy his new estate undisturbed by the lower orders. Like other landowners in the area, Sibbald had at his disposal the Enclosure Acts, which ordered that all land be assigned to registered owners. Between 1790 and 1817 powerful men like Sibbald reduced the common land of the area from about 2,000 acres to a mere 112 at a stroke. Needless to say, the peasants who exercised their traditional rights to grazing, cutting peat and the like, were never to be the beneficiaries of this process. All those on Sibbald’s newly regularized land were expelled and their homes razed to the ground. By way of meagre compensation, a new Bog Trust was established in 1817 to allow the expelled peasants to cut peat and timber from the bog in South Ascot, which is still common land. So, the wealthy got elegantly landscaped estates, the local farmers a bog.
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| Nash's Field, the original site of Sunninghill (photo by Mick Crawley) |
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| Repton's artificial lake |
In 1854 an owner of railways and a Lancashire cotton mill, John Hargreaves, Jr., bought the Silwood estate from the widow of a Mr. Forbes. Hargreaves died in 1874 and the estate was sold to Charles Patrick Stewart, a partner in a steam locomotive manufacturing company, in 1875. Stewart demolished Sibbald’s Georgian mansion (he considered the rooms too small for his guests), and commissioned a new building at the other end of the park, removed from the smells of Silwood Farm. The architect of the new mansion was Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905), who designed the Natural History Museum in London. The new house was designed as a party venue, convenient for Ascot race course. The ground floor was an enormous ballroom. Overlooking the ballroom on the first floor was a gallery, which gave access to large and luxurious bedroom suites suitable for Stewart’s guests, who included the sons of Queen Victoria.
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| Waterhouse's Silwood house |
During the second World War the house became a military hospital. Nissan huts were built in the grounds to house staff. This combination of luxury and utility was purchased in 1947 by Imperial College. A few of the WWII buildings survive: the former sergeant’s mess is the student canteen and bar. As we walked home from Mick’s tour Jan and I encountered a PhD student carrying to his room a lunch of fish fingers and chips, which might well have satisfied a wartime sergeant.
Wealthy landowners were not the only force that has shaped the Silwood Park landscape. Mick informed us that the Waterhouse mansion once had an unimpeded view of Ascot race course across the Repton landscape, until in 1953 myxomatosis reached the UK from France. The disease devastated the rabbit population of Silwood, whose voracious appetites had kept open the view of Ascot. Now that they no longer had to compete with rabbits, a variety of tree species established themselves, and a handsome wood now obscures the view of the race course.
One of the glories of Silwood is its population of oak trees. Every species of oak that can survive in a northern temperate climate is represented. In 1982 Mick established an experiment to monitor 30 English oaks. The quantity of acorns produced by these trees has been monitored since then, to establish a long-term record of annual acorn production (calculated by counting the numbers of acorns, a task that must require considerable patience) and the effect of the invasive Knopper gall wasp on the reproductive output of the trees. The trees have not meekly submitted to the attacks of the wasps: years of low acorn production alternate with higher acorn yields that out-compete the predators. Last year’s production was a record.
Mick explains the 1,000 years plus life cycle of the oak quite simply: 500 years to grow, 500 years of adult life, 500 years to die. In the last phase, trees shed limbs to conserve resources, and after death provide an ecosystem for other organisms to flourish.
Repton’s man-made lake is fed by two streams, one clear and the other one of Sunninghill’s several red iron-rich streams (like the waters taken at the Wells). The red colour is produced by bacteria, which thrive on the iron salts and form a gelatinous red substance.
As Mick observes in his book, an unusual number of estates and grand residences occupied land near Sunninghill. Across Buckhurst Road, the road to Windsor, from Silwood was The Oaks (now a hotel), home to Charles Churchill, grand-nephew of the first Duke of Marlborough. Close by was Buckhurst Park, its house a mix of neo-Tudor and neo-Georgian styles, built on land from which the peasant residents of Bucket Hill were evicted. From 1891 Buckhurst was the country seat of Sir Joseph Savory (1843-1921). A few yards along the London Road is Tittenhurst Park, a 72-acre estate where a Georgian house was built in 1737. In 1869, Thomas Holloway, the founder of Royal Holloway college in Egham, lived there. Later owners included John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who sold it to Ringo Starr in 1973. Ringo, his wife and son were still there when we moved to Sunninghill in 1982. He sold the estate to a United Arab Emirates potentate in 1988. A short distance further on was Sunningdale Park, its house designed about by James Wyatt (1746-1813). Wyatt was also responsible for the late 18th century rebuilding of a 17th century house in Sunninghill Park, originally enclosed as a hunting park in 1377. Mick’s book lists several more estates in a remarkably small area, several of which have disappeared and been replaced by housing developments at various times.[vi]
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| Tittenhurst Park |
[i] The Flora of Berkshire (Harpenden, Hertfordshire: Brambleby Books, 2005), 204
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Most of the history that follows is adapted from The Flora of Berkshire chapter 5, “SIlwood Park and its History,” 215-242. Some information was also taken from the Wikipedia entry on Silwood Park.
[iv] The Flora of Berkshire, 216
[v] The late Norman church was replaced in the 19th century by the current building: Ibid., 243
[vi] The Flora of Berkshire, 244-252
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