| Aston Manor was probably well wooded, with birch and hazel rather
than oak in prehistoric times. First clearances, which may well have
been pre-Roman, were on the gentle slopes round the ridge on whose
end Aston Flail sits. On the gravelly terrace near the Tame, several
feet above normal river level, a large quadrilateral moat was made,
its platform built up to provide a dry firm site. When William Hutton
visited the site in the 1780s, the moat was inundated by flood, and
he was characteristically scathing about its builder. If it could
be drowned by the Georgian Tame, which must surely have been less
in volume and more deeply trenched than the river beside which the
moat was cut, it must always have been a damply dismal location !
The date of first occupation is unknown.
It is likely that a natural diversion of 'Shire Brook' from its
obvious confluence point with the Tame below Witton Ford was used
to fill the moat: alternately the moat leat was an artificial channel
from the brook at the bend of Witton Lane. Part of the moat was
still visible, though much silted, until the late 1880s when Serpentine
and Charles Roads, and the east ends of Yew Tree and Village Roads,
exactly defined the ancient ditch. Within it stood the manor house
of Aston, about which nothing is known: it had no resident lord
from 1367 when John atte Holte acquired it but continued to live
at Duddeston. The extent of the demesne is not certain, though it
may well have been bounded by the river and Witton Lane, Aston Hall
Road, and Lichfield Road. This would accord with the known situation
of the demesne in Birmingham and elsewhere.
The church was built on the terrace, a bowshot from the moat. By
Georgian times a great meander of the Tame had thrust southwestward
to within a stone's throw of the moat and little farther from the
church. It may be guessed that in the eight or more centuries since
the first small chapel was built the river had moved much nearer,
the strong current on the outside of the bend gouging out the gravelly
bank and the slower water depositing material on the inside.
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