Moats and Earthworks

It is probably true that until Tudor times any rural house of fair size would be moated. A water filled ditch served as a defence against raiders and outlaws, as a fish-pond, and as a drain. Most moat sites , deserted, had fallen into disuse, becoming infilled middens and shrunken duck ponds before antiquarians could record them. So, few appear on maps and fewer still survive today. In this Quarter we can be sure of only one, and that unrecognisable. 'The Moats', partly obliterated by the widening of Yardley Wood Road opposite Haunch Lane, seems to have been a ring earthwork at the foot of a slope, with water defences fed by a rill on three sides. The date and purpose of this feature are unknown.

It is one of several sites on or close to the manor bound which may date from the early medieval expansion into the waste. Even less can be said of a site at Swanshurst, where the marshy valleys of Coldbath Brook and a tributary protected two sides of an 11-acre earthwork. A line of trees marks the slumped and quarried bank parallel to the brook, but few other traces have survived destruction by ploughing in 1821. The probable extent is indicated by the gardens of house in Yardley Wood and Windermere Roads. A possible redoubt knoll at the east end was later a windmill site.

At the spring-source of Robin Hood Brook, round which Highfield Road curves, a moat survived until the 1930's, and there must have been others at a dozen ancient dwelling-sites.