The Landscape History of Wickhambrook Suffolk
The Landscape and History of Wickhambrook with Michelle Bullivant June 2026 talk advert.
It was a pleasure to spend an evening with the Wickhambrook Local History Society recently, sharing some of the landscape history research that I have been undertaking across the parish over the last year.
The large bank that encloses the back of the paying field at Thorns - Our walk revealed that people remembered this being constructed c. early 1980’s from many lorry loads of material coming from Haverhill and near Sturmer, in order to flatten the once sloping playing field, which had previously been a challenge to play football on. This is why it is important to be able to talk to the residents and people who have lived in the area to better work out the truth behind such unusual landscape features.
The evening began with a short walk around Thorns, looking at earthworks, routeways, historic buildings and other landscape clues that often go unnoticed in everyday life. We then returned to the hall for an illustrated talk exploring how maps, aerial photographs, historic documents, place-names and fieldwork can all be combined to help unravel the story of a settlement.
Routeways and Roads of Wickhambrook
One of the things that makes Wickhambrook particularly fascinating is that it does not fit the pattern of a typical Suffolk village. Rather than having a single village centre focused around one green, Wickhambrook developed as a dispersed parish made up of numerous hamlets and greens, each with its own distinctive character and history. Understanding how these individual settlements relate to one another raises a number of intriguing questions about the parish's origins and development.
Baxters Green - traditional triangle green
During the research so far, a number of themes have begun to emerge. The parish boundaries themselves appear unusually interesting, with routeways rather than waterways often defining the limits of the parish. The village greens vary considerably in form and character, perhaps reflecting different origins and functions. Historic aerial photographs reveal earthworks, former field boundaries and possible settlement features that are no longer visible at ground level, while old maps provide valuable evidence for how the landscape has changed over time.
Aerial view of Thorns playing field with the banked eastern and northeastern boundary. All to the right of the marked football pitch is known to be modern infill (c.1980) which was brought in to make the playing field flat. However running through the pitch, just to the right centre of the marked football pitch, is a fairly wide, liner crop mark which could indicate a much higher older ditch and/or boundary. It follows on from the hedged boundary above it. With no further evidence from the maps, aerials and documents which would give a date or purpose for this feature, it is a good candidate for being dated and its use identified further, by a simple archaeological test section as part of a community excavation.
Particular attention has recently been focused on the Thorns area, where the surviving landscape preserves clues relating to the former windmill, school, chapel, roads, ponds, wells and other elements that together helped shape the development of the hamlet. Even seemingly small details, such as field names, earthworks or decorative features in local buildings, can provide important clues to the wider story.
Some of the features identified on aerial photography, within the Wickhambrook parish which we discussed. Further blogs on these will come later.
As is often the case with landscape history, every answer seems to generate several new questions. Is Thorns primarily a crossroads settlement that developed around the mill? How old are some of the parish's routeways? What can the shape of the greens tell us about medieval and earlier activity? Are some parts of the parish preserving evidence of much earlier settlement patterns?
Built features of Thorns. Just a few of the interesting features that we noted on our short walk around Thorns - these included a bench mark on the village hall, an old hidden and inscribed foundation stone on the bottom side of the chapel wall, house names providing clues to old industry, and a black brickwork star on the end wall of the old millers cottage which may be a way of showing of wealth, but being Suffolk, could be a bit of a protection mark.
The research is still very much ongoing, but one of the most rewarding aspects of the project has been seeing how aerial photography, historic mapping, documentary sources and field observation can be combined to build a richer understanding of the parish and its development through time.
Bronze Age burial mound just outside the parish boundary near Wickham Street and the main road between Bury St Edmunds and Haverhill.
The evening was not intended to provide all the answers, but rather to demonstrate some of the techniques that can be used to investigate the history of Wickhambrook and to highlight some of the questions that have emerged during the research so far.
All Saint’s Parish Church Wickhambrook - there is so much to say about this church which now sits alone with only a few original houses by it. It is one of the keys in working out the development and history of Wickhambrook - more on this in a later blog. The small picture inserted is a beautiful and unusual stone carving of what is now believed to be a Norman Knight with his shield. It is now positioned up high on the wall at the back of the church where it is covered by a clear plastic to help protect it.
I hope the evening encouraged people to look at familiar places with fresh eyes and perhaps inspired others to begin exploring the history of their own corners of Wickhambrook. There is still much more to discover, and I look forward to continuing the research in the months ahead.
Thorns - place name clues. - The hamlet of Thorns was called Upper Thorns and Lower Thorns in some older documents, indicating a bit of separation to some degree within the settlement. It is easy to surmise that Thorns got its name from some once thorny area but in the old newspaper clip above we find that Thorns was also once known as ‘Smithy Thorns’ - we know from the earliest maps available to us that there was a smithy on the crossroads with only a couple of other buildings. So could this actually mean that Thorns is named after a blacksmith with the surname Thorns. This is possible because when we check the Wickhambrook parish registers there was a family with the surname Thornes in the parish in the 17th century at least. This demonstrates that things may not all be as they seem but further research is needed to confirm or refute this hypothesis.
The pictures included here are just a few from the slide show given on the evening, further more detailed blogs on the various aspects of the history of Wickhambrook that we discussed will be published later as separate blogs.