A short historical story by Stephen Howard. Fact and part speculation.
PREFACE
I grew up in Lady Bay, a smaller part of West Bridgford, and as such feel an obvious connection with its history and geography, however small that might be, in the context of this big old world of ours. I was actually born in Highbury Vale hospital in 1957 but my mum and dad had a flat at 69 Trent Boulevard in Lady Bay. They, Eric and Pearl, later moved to another flat at 59 Trent Boulevard and then bought a house on Melbourne Road, number 23, in 1962, and along with my younger brother Robert, who was born in 1961, that’s where I grew up. I went to Lady Bay Infants and Junior School on Trent Boulevard before going to Rushcliffe Comprehensive School in 1969. As I grew up, I discovered the garden, I played on Melbourne Road with friends, lots of hide and seek and ball games (although these wouldn’t be popular with residents), and gradually I ventured further afield, the Boulevard, the shops and so on until I knew my way around. I played down on Trent Fields, watched Nottingham Forest FC train on the pitch they had there and sit by the rivers edge. As a family we would walk our dog ‘Bess’ on the fields and the along the river sometimes watching the speed boat racing on a Sunday morning in the 1960’s. The Grantham canal provided a look into pond life, pike and eels and Adbolton Lane was a route out into, as it seemed then, the countryside. As I got older, my horizons broadened and I explored further but my return to home was always ‘Lady Bay’, a bunch of houses that, seemingly, had been there forever. As far as I was concerned it had little history, as I, at that young age had neither. Many years later I wrote a song about my memories of growing up in Lady Bay. Take a listen.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND SOURCES
I will make reference to some of my sources as I go along but a few pointers will not go amiss here. I’ve used the British newspaper archive to find articles mentioning the area and with other resources (census, maps), joined the dots, so to speak, to corroborate my findings. The British newspaper archive is a fantastic resource but is obviously incomplete. Sometimes when you are searching a particular subject there may not be results you’d expect. “Did it really happen” I think. However, more often than not, particular publications are lost or not yet digitised. Some stories were shared so sometimes you can find a local story in a neighbouring County’s newspaper. It is often a matter of luck but never the less it throws up some historical gems.
The roots of the name “Lady Bay” are not clear but Pat Rodriguez (a former resident of Lady Bay) wrote a small history of Lady Bay which you can see here in which she suggests the following: “Why is it called Lady Bay? There are several theories as to the origin of the name Lady Bay. The earliest goes back to AD 910 when Aethelflaeda, the Lady of the Mercians, ordered a ‘Burgh’ or fortress to be built on the south side of the Trent. ‘Lady Bay’ may have been a corruption of ‘The Lady’s Burgh’. Another possibility refers to a chapel which stood on Trent Bridge in the 13th century, dedicated to St Mary, which might have given the name ‘Lady’s Bay’ to a bend in the river. Yet again in 1815, a historian of Nottingham advanced the theory that a plot of land, now known as the Hook, was the pasture of ‘My Lady’s Bay Mare’ or simply a mare called ‘Lady Bay’“
Robert Mellors on the nottshistory website offers good evidence of the ancient roots of Lay Bay relating a report from 1613 “We present Fostard, of Bridgford, for inclosinge the Middletorne waie, that they can not goe according as our libartie goeth in Bridgford field nere to our Lady Baie.” and setting out some boundaries of the area.
I think they are all plausible and we might never know for sure but as we can see the area was called Lady Bay before the Grantham Canal was opened in 1797 so I think we might first consider what the geographical boundaries are. Generally, most of us define Lady Bay as that triangle shape bordered by The River Trent and the Grantham canal / A52 (Radcliffe Road) but with historical hindsight we might now think of it being the area bordered by The River Trent and the Grantham Road (A52 Radcliffe Road). So, the furthest point west would be at Trent Bridge giving some credence to the ‘chapel’ which stood on Trent Bridge in the 13th century. Again, maybe we will never know for sure but it is worth considering. Here are some maps to illustrate that point.
I am by no means an expert and I will often just touch on historical events that if you wish you could explore further and as suggested in my title, I have allowed myself a certain degree of imagination and speculation to give a sense of the development of the area over time. I will often use modern day place names that will be out of context in the time I am using them but will allow you to place yourself in the story.
Britain and our local area before the last ice-age are, unless we are one of those experts, is best left to the imagination. Both modern humans and Neanderthal figures would have roamed the early terrain of Britain, forested and full of large beasts and it is reckoned that the River Trent had a different course to that of today, still passing to the south of Nottingham but continuing in a straight line to the Wash on the East coast.
INTRODUCTION
Lady Bay is that area of West Bridgford on the left side of the Grantham canal and Radcliffe Road as you head out to Radcliffe on Trent defined by Trent Boulevard, Holme Road and Rutland Road and the criss-cross of Roads in between and the Trent Fields up to the River Trent. House building started in the late 1880’s and we know there was a farm called “Burrow Hill” before that and the fields close to the river are part of a flood plain and in a nutshell that is it, but let’s see if we can add a little more to the story. A story of a river, a road, a canal, Burrow Hill Farm and the eventual building of the area we now call Lady Bay. Today, and for the whole of the 20th century, this area might roughly be defined by the borders of these those roads. Not absolutely exact, but a reasonable starting point. However, if we were to travel back in time before the housing development of the 1890’s and before the old London railway line and even before the building of the Grantham canal then our definition of what constitutes Lady Bay might be a little different. It is also worth remembering that to the East of Lady Bay is Adbolton. Steeped in history, Adbolton was listed in the Doomsday Book (Domesday book) of 1086 and the Hall and farm would have been the nearest and larger neighbour to Burrow Hill Farm. I will add a few stories as they seem appropriate.
So, to try and get a feeling for this place, I want you to imagine you are walking along Holme Road from the junction with Trent Boulevard, with the houses to your right and the Trent fields to your left. As you pass the intersecting roads of Woodland, Melbourne and passing Lady Bay Road itself but before reaching Pierrepont Road, you will find yourself at the high point of a small incline. You couldn’t call this a hill by any means, Lady Bay is pretty flat, but it is just a slight raising of elevation and you could look down into the fields and notice that there is a drop of some 10 metres say. It is here that I want to use as a marker, a vantage point in the unravelling story of the area. If you stand here and look over the fields you will see the River Trent and Nottingham beyond and behind you are the roads and houses that we now associate with this area we call Lady Bay. I might have chosen another point, by the Grantham canal and the A52 road say, looking back into that housing or at the beginning of Adbolton Lane looking back down Trent Boulevard but my almost insignificant little spot is where I want you to imagine you are. In an exercise of time travel let’s go back thousands of years and begin our journey.
Chapter one: WHEN NOBODY LIVED HERE AND THE FIRST SETTLERS
Stood on the brow of this slight incline, which was a little larger and steeper than today, thousands of years since softening its prominence, and looking north, at the water and the woods on distant hills, there is a calm peace, with only the sound of the birds whistling and fluttering and the occasional splash of water among the reeds as ducks and geese cavort on a warm summers day. It is 6,000bc and the melt water of the last great ice age had finally subsided, the Humber lake (a glacial lake covering a large part of Northern Lincolnshire that at its height may have reached into south Nottinghamshire) had mostly drained away, and the river we now know as the Trent was weaving its way through the areas we would later come to know as Lady Bay and Colwick. The river wouldn’t be the well defined banked flow we are used to today, but in parts, a wide meandering marshy wetland often indistinguishable from the surrounding grasses and vegetation. Idyllic in summer and desolate in winter. As we look down from our point on the ridge the water is sweeping right past us, as its course then, would sometimes bring it right up to that ridge, fish clearly seen. On the distant hills we can see a few stone-age figures gazing over the terrain watching some large beasts and making plans to ensnare one.
As time rolled by, a few early Bronze age people, maybe from settlements near to Gamston, would sometimes be seen wading through this lush wetland, fishing and catching waterfowl, which was in abundance and this same small vantage point gave a nice view and over time it became a brief stopping off place for a few travellers, taking a break, before carrying on with the chores of the day. Another thousand years passed by and a Iron age family from around Bingham followed the trail close to the river and on a good day they too stopped on the brow and looked over the scene of tranquility. Moving on, the year is now 250ad, and one late Autumn, the rain lashed down as a Roman family on horseback made there way along the riverway track from Margidunum, near to modern day East Bridgford, to somewhere close to modern day Clifton, to visit relatives. Since the dawn of time natural trails had evolved where either animals had passed or along geographical features like a hillside ridge or along the course of a river and this track followed the River Trent as it passed a small settlements, one that we would later know as Adbolton.
A few miles away, on the other side of the river, in the settlement of Tigguo Cobauc (Place of Caves, as described by a Welsh Brythonic speaking monk) somewhere near to the old Nottingham, as we know it today, was soon to see newcomers moving in nearby. By 600ad the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, settlers from Europe, were setting up homes near to the strategic River Trent, as the kingdom of Mercia extended it’s reach, and small boats could be seen carrying goods to and fro. It was a good place to settle and an Anglian tribe called Snotingas made home near to modern day Snotinton (Sneinton) and later in Snotengaham (Nottingham), as it would become known. The strategic sandstone outcrop that overlooked Broadmarsh and the River Trent proved to be an important vantage point and a permanent site was established.
For the next 200 years the Anglo-Saxon settlements grew, the eastern part of the kingdom of Mercia, and locally their sphere of influence extended to areas we now know as Arnold and Clifton. The River Trent was shallow enough in places for it to be forded and such a place was where the main Trent Bridge crosses today. On the south side a track from this ford led to the tiny hamlet of West Bridgford and another took a route past places we now know as Lady Bay, Adbolton and Holme Pierrepont and beyond including the brow of the small incline where we are still stood. The river was still wide and meandering, and at times flowing close to Holme Road as we would later know it. One of the many Anglo-Saxon chiefs, who had regularly passed this spot and had been taken with its beauty, was later laid to rest in a small burial mound atop of the incline, looking back over the river towards Sneinton.
From the late 700’s the Vikings, new visitors to British shores, were making their way through the northern and eastern parts of the land and in 867-68ad the Vikings took Nottingham. Led by Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan Ragnarsson, they fortified themselves in Nottingham. King Burgred of Mercia getting help from Wessex, prompting King Aethelred and Alfred to besiege the Vikings. Unable to break through, no battle took place and a negotiated peace was brokered, allowing the Vikings to return to York. However, the Danes remained in control of Nottingham, which became one of the five boroughs along with Derby, Lincoln, Leicester and Stamford (basically the area we now know as the East Midlands). This area is also known as being that of the ‘Dane-law’.
The Colwick/Nottingham side of the river was hillier than the southern side which was a marshy wetland particularly around Lady Bay, Adbolton, and Holme Pierrepont. After crossing at the ford over the river from the Nottingham side, travellers would either go straight ahead towards West Bridgford, or bear left and take the Grantham Road and sometimes split from that road to this track along the southern edge of the river which became known as the road to the Holmes, an ‘Old Norse’ word that describes the small islets in a wetland. This road would later, simply be called Holme Road. The ford over the Trent would eventually be the sight of the first bridge, a wooden structure, built in 920.
From our vantage point on the ridge we would see both Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and maybe a few old Britons using the River Trent as this great waterway, or to plunder for fish and fowl, and pass along the Holme Road on their travels. The next new people to travel this road would be the ‘Normans’ who in 1066 had invaded Britain and by 1068 had built a castle in Nottingham on the site of the old Anglo-Danish fort. Again, Nottingham was of great strategic importance in their control of central England.
MORE TO COME
MORE TO COME
MORE TO COME