The Oxford to Cambridge Arc 3
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The ruined church of St Peter in the lost village of Stanton (now known as Stanton Low)
The Oxford to Cambridge Arc
Buckingham to Newport Pagnell
After Buckingham, all routes headed to Stanton Bridge, now no more than a hidden culvert carrying a small tributary of the River Great Ouse under an unclassified road at New Bradwell. It is highly likely that the maker of the Gough Map passed this same way too.
Ogilby’s 1675 route
Looking at the stretch from Buckingham to Newport Pagnell one is struck by the way that Ogilby followed the route of the current main road (A422) east of Leckhamstead, then west of Thornton, but then how suddenly he veered off to pass east of Passingham. Somehow Ogilby’s road crossed the River Great Ouse somewhere north of Beachampton and near to a water mill, as described on his map. Study of the current Ordnance Survey Map reveals this crossing point to be where a modern girder farm bridge carries a bridleway over a narrowing of the Ouse at the aptly named Mill Farm.
Ogilby's Buckingham to Newport Pagnell route. I have shown John Senex's 1780 reiteration of Ogilby's original map as it reproduces more clearly.
Ogilby’s road deviates from the modern road by passing close to today’s Mount Mill Farm, crossing what were then unhedged open common fields, to the bridge at today’s Mill Farm.
John Cary’s 1787 map of the area was completed before the canals changed the landscape and indeed highlights Ogilby’s route which runs south of Stoney Stratford and Wolverton. A comparison of Cary’s map with the current OS Map shows that after Mill Farm Ogilby described a route that aligns with what is now the Ouse Valley Way footpath into Calverton village. So it would appear that a combination of field enclosure and the coming of the canals caused the change in road priorities since Cary's map was completed.
John Cary’s 1787 map
OS map showing the Ouse Valley Way
After Calverton, Ogilby’s route aligns to a current bridleway known historically as Gib Lane, then crosses what he describes as the the ‘Road to London’ and ‘to Chester and Holyhead’. This of course is Watling Street.
 Section of the map highlighting Stanton Bridge
Ogilby then describes a lane passing through common fields to Stanton Bridge. Despite the plethora or recent Milton Keynes developments, traces of the old lane travelled by Ogilby between Calverton and Stanton Bridge remain, with some key locators detailed on the map below. (To be explored at a later date.)
Stanton Bridge crosses a brook tributary of the River Ouse. Next to the bridge is the appropriately named Stonebridge Farm (pictured below), now residential properties, which is situated at the western approach to NewBradwell.
Stanton Bridge was critical to all the Oxford to Cambridge routes which passed though Buckingham and Bedford right up to the motorway era.
New Bradwell, being a Victorian railway town was of course not mentioned by Ogilby, however he did include the nearby village of Stanton. This however is now a ‘lost village’, with a church in ruins and only undulations in the earth to mark the site of a once grand Stanton Hall, also included on Ogilby’s map as ‘the Hall’.
Ogilby’s route then continues to Newport Pagnell along what is very much the line of the present unclassified Newport Road, which was previously, and very logically, a continuation of the A422 between Buckingham and Newport Pagnell, and beyond as the A422 to Bedford. This 1920s road classification is a good example of an A road designation, made in living memory of the turnpike era, echoing the ancient ways of Ogilby, Gough and the pre-mapped ways of travellers in search of river crossings from times prehistoric.
© John Dunn.
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Bridge over the Great Ouse at Little Linford
The Oxford to Cambridge Arc
Buckingham to Newport Pagnell
Herman Moll’s 1710 route
This is the most enigmatic of all the Oxford to Cambridge routes that pass through Buckingham in that it is the exception to the Stanton Bridge rule.
Moll’s reproduction of Ogilby’s strip map-itineraries in a conventional cartographic form was done at such a small scale that differences can easily be accounted for as possible errors.
Nevertheless, his connecting road between Buckingham and Newport Pagnell deviates from the expected pattern so much that it would be wrong not to at least consider it.
Section of Moll’s 1710 map of England
Going by the river crossings, Moll’s 1710 route appears to have been as follows.
From Buckingham Moll kept to the west of the Ouse broadly along the later turnpike route of the current A422.
Moll’s map is wrong in that it shows the junction of Watling Street and the Northampton road to be south of the River Great Ouse. The junction has in fact to be north of the river at Old Stratford.
Moll’s map shows that he kept to the west and north of Stoney Stratford, crossing Watling Street, presumably at Old Stratford.
The route then appears to cross the Northampton road, before veering off eastwards to cross the River Tove before it meets the Great Ouse. Such abridge exists between Cosgrove and Castlethorpe. We can conjecture then that Moll turned right off the Northampton road towards Castlethorpe, crossing the Tove on the way.
Bridge over the Great Ouse at Little Linford
We can conjecture too that from Castlethorpe Moll travelled to Haversham and then to Little Linford, where he crossed the Great Ouse before reaching Newport Pagnell. There have been two little bridges over the Great Ouse at Little Linford, in one form or another, since at least the1300s.
Back to Stanton Bridge
A later map by Moll, completed in 1724, returns to the Stanton Bridge crossing, but still differs from the other principal map and itinerary makers in my survey.
Section of Moll’s 1724 map of Buckinghamshire
This later Moll route between Buckingham and Newport Pagnell is the most 'modern' of the lot, in that he again kept to the west of the Great Ouse broadly along the later turnpike route and current A422 all the way to Old Stratford, where he turned southwards along Watling Street to cross the bridge to Stoney Stratford. Certainly, until the coming of the new Milton Keynes metropolis you would have chosen this same route.
Moll's crossing of the River Great Ouse was the biggest difference. Whereas the others veered off the precursor to the A422 and made their river crossings near Beachampton via now what are minor lanes, Moll kept going to the bridge at Old Stratford.
Did Moll have to ford the River Leck at what is now Cattleford Bridge on the A422 near Thornton, whereas the others wanted to keep their feet dry? Did Beachampton and Calverton offer the most direct route to Stanton Bridge?
Whatever the reason for the divergent paths, after crossing the Great Ouse to Stoney Stratford Moll rejoined the Ogilby route, passing south of Wolverton (now Old Wolverton), over Stanton Bridge, where he deliberately depicted the tributary south of the Great Ouse, and so to Newport Pagnell.
© John Dunn.
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Bridge over the canal at Thornton, on the Cary route.
The Oxford to Cambridge Arc
Buckingham to Newport Pagnell
John Cary's 1815 route from his New Itinerary
Like Ogilby, Cary left Buckingham by the road that has become the modernA422 and would have met the first turnpike gate at the junction with the lane to Foscote (SP 7238 3540).
However, a feature of the landscape that did not exist in Ogilby’s time, but had appeared by the time Cary passed this way, was the Buckingham Arm of the Grand Junction Canal, opened in 1801. The lack of a bridge over the canal effectively cut off access to Ogilby’s river crossing at Mill Farm, Beachampton (see above). This is why Cary turned right from the future A422 at the turning for Thornton where a new bridge had been constructed over the canal next to the bridge over the Great Ouse, allowing the road to pass through the village before turning left for Beachampton.
It has to be remarked that even though the road from Buckingham to Stoney Stratford via Deanshanger was turnpiked in 1815, the same year that this edition of Cary’s itinerary was published, he still preferred to follow the Beachampton way to Stanton Bridge, and did so up to and including the final edition of his New Itinerary in 1828.
From Beachampton, Cary continued towards Calverton, but unlike Ogilby, he did not continue down what was Gib Lane and straight to Stanton Bridge, as the new canal had closed this off as an option. However there was a bridge over the canal at Woolverton (Old Wolverton).
This is why Cary followed what is now the current unclassified road away from Calverton to Stony Stratford, which he passed through and on to Woolverton (Old Wolverton), before crossing Stanton Bridge and thence to Newport Pagnell, after passing through a turnpike gate in what was then open country at the junction of Newport Road and Bradwell Road (SP 8304 4152).
Clearly, Stanton Bridge, then a stone bridge over a little tributary of the Great Ouse, now a hidden culvert at New Bradwell, was important for hundreds of years to travellers on the Oxford to Cambridge route via Buckingham and Bedford.
© John Dunn.
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The traveller using Paterson will have passed by Thornton Church
The Oxford to Cambridge Arc
The Buckingham to Newport Pagnell section of Daniel Paterson's Oxford to Cambridge itinerary
Paterson’s Oxford to Cambridge route via Buckingham and Bedford was a section of his Bristol to Norwich itinerary.
In all essentials the section covered between Buckingham and Newport Pagnell was the same as recommended in John Cary’s New Itinerary.
© John Dunn.
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