Village Voice Dec/Jan 2019 Issue 189

ASHWELLS
(GOMM) VALLEY
The History of Ashwells (Gomm) Valley
(Part 16)... Stanley Garrett and the
common land (1927-45)
In 1902, when Dr William
Rose purchased Ashwells Farm
with 58 acres from Lord
Carrington and started to build
Ashwells manor house, King's
Wood still extended across
Cock Lane which was a lane
through the wood rather than
one running at its side. Dr
Rose was anxious to keep the
trees as a shelter for his house,
so his cousin, Sir Philip Rose,
who had purchased the
freehold of King's Wood in
1882, but subject to the
exercise of common rights,
agreed to give him ‘the small
strip of Kingswood between
Ashwells and Gomms Lane’
(an earlier name for Cock Lane because it led to
Gomms Farm). In addition, Lord Carrington
sold Dr Rose the adjoining small triangular strip
of King’s Wood which runs up from Ashwells
beside the Middle School.
Dr Rose got into trouble with local people
because he had fenced off his part of King’s
Wood preventing access to a chalk pit (still
visible as a dell below the entrance to the
Middle School). Local protestors pulled down
part of the fence and he agreed to remove it. He
had also built a Dutch Barn of which a small
corner encroached on the wood, but although it
was acknowledged that ‘the Council has no
power to sanction an encroachment, however
small’, this was not pursued because he had also
built ‘an extremely good footpath levelled and
www.pennandtylersgreen.org.uk
Village Voice December 2018/January 2019
clinkered’ leading from the Horse & Jockey to
Cock Lane, parts of which we still use today.
King's Wood was purchased by CWPC with
public subscription in 1922, but did not include
the far side of Cock Lane, although the sale
map, when Stanley Garrett bought Ashwells in
1927, still described the areas shaded in green as
'Common'. In 1938, Stanley Garrett complained
about trespassers and dumping of rubbish on his
land, and because his deeds
King's Wood sale map of 1882 showing
Cock Lane(then called Gomms Lane)
as a track through the wood
showed the land as
‘Common’, he asked the
Parish Council if he could
fence it off with barbed wire.
Quite mistakenly, permission
was given. Four letters to the
Bucks Free Press record local
outrage at its loss, but to no
avail, and in due course the
rights of common were
forgotten and the some 35
houses of Ashwells,
Greenridge, Lancaster Ride
and the end of Cock Lane,
were built on it in c.1968.
Common rights were not
extinguished on King's Wood
until 1976. Miles Green
Part of the plan of Ashwells Manor in 1927 still
describing the former parts of King's Wood
(coloured green) as 'Common'
29