Clophill Inclosure

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To see a larger image, please click on the thumbnail [MA55]

Most Bedfordshire parishes were enclosed in the late 18th or early 19th century. Until then parishes had a few large fields and people owned strips of land in one or more of these fields. Enclosure was a rationalisation of these landholdings. The large fields were subdivided into smaller fields and anyone owning strips became entitled to a proportional allotment of land in the new field layout - usually between one and five of these smaller fields. This, of course, gave us our modern rural landscape of small fields divided by hedges, fences or walls. This map shows Clophill upon its inclosure in 1826. The map is aligned north south, with the modern A6 running down the left hand side and the long road across the sheet about a third of the way down being the road through Beadlow to Chicksands and Shefford. Note the position of the houses marked for comparison with the 1883 Ordnance Survey map.|