Dipping Pond 

Archaeology Day
17 July 2007

Wimpole Park is one of the great archaeological gems of Cambridgeshire not because treasures were found here or that the place was associated with great historical events, but because it can tell us about the way ordinary people lived there hundreds of years ago.

A Wimpole Walks leaflet and a Wimpole Archaeology leaflet can be purchased from the Stable Block.

An Archaeology Day is held in July each year at Wimpole which includes an excavation, display and practical archaeology.

The next Archaeology Day is on Sunday 16 July 2006

When the park was created three hundred years ago the old village of Wimpole was cleared away, the tenants were evicted and their fields put down to grass. It is now possible to walk down long vanished lanes, across the undulations of ridge and furrow fields, past the windmill mound and stand on low grassy mounds that are all that is left of the villages. Each mound representing a house such as a tiny cottage, heated by a single fire in which John and Agnes Pratt and their six children lived. Elsewhere one can stroll around the slight remains of the great formal gardens that once graced Wimpole. Here were once summerhouses, gravel walks, cool fountains and colourful flowerbeds, all swept away by changing fashions. Belonging to a still earlier time are the remains of a medieval moated manor house, long forgotten and lost, in dense woodland.

All this evidence is only preserved here because much of the park has never been ploughed since the villages were cleared. Wimpole is now an island of preserved archaeology in a sea of intensive arable farming where such fragile evidence has been lost forever.