NEWSLETTER 5 Click back button to return
 Old as the hills
"How old is Westley Farm?" people ask.  Geologically, the farm is a sandwich of two beds of Cotswold limestone with clay in between.  It was deposited some 210 million years ago in the warm shallow seas of the Jurassic era.  Though rich in fossils I have never found a fish or even fish tooth.  I did however find an odd rock, shaped like a donkey hoof, which is now in the local museum labeled as half the vertebra of a Megalosaurus.  This beast must have died on the shore and been washed out to sea.
Hege and I keep an eye on the ground every time we walk past a ploughed field, looking for items of interest.  Just the other side of Aston Down airfield in the space of half an hour we picked up a dozen worked flints.  Experts tell us some are Mesolithic (hunter gatherers) and some Neolithic (farmers).
Conglomerate of bivalves
and brachiopods.
Metal detectorists searching the fields turn up musket balls, horse harness and assorted coins.  The earliest of these is a half groat minted in Canterbury in the reign of Edward lV (1460). Surprisingly nothing from the Roman period has ever been found, despite numerous Roman villas in the vicinity.  Roman snails are
found nearby.  Legend has it that Westley Woods was the secret meeting place of the Levellers at a time when dissident worship was punishable with imprisonment (1660-1680)
Just 14 acres of ancient woodlands were originally "grubbed up" at he beginning of the19th Century when government support through the Corn Laws led to high prices for agricultural produce.  The barn (now The Loft) has an inscription scratched into plaster in the roof space “1793 R.B 1893” indicating the date of original build in 1793 and a rebuild after a fire in 1893. The early date is suspect. The Farm was still called Westley Wood Farm in 1885 when it was part of the 600 acre estate of Chalford Place which over the years came into the ownership of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
The extraordinary Jackdaw bridge was built by Isembard Kingdom Brunel in 1845 as an inclined plane for lowering stone from Jackdaw Quarry, over the railway, to barges on the canal below. The canal was built in 1790 and is now sadly abandoned and derelict.  The Cotswolds Canal trust have ambitious plans for its restoration.
Around 1900 the farm was bought by Osbert Cecil Crewe, a cattle dealer who made so much money that he bought a local farm for each of his four sons. He had eleven children. The picture shows Cecil and his three youngest, Eric, Fred and Sissy standing outside the front door of the farmhouse circa 1905.

                                                               Julian Usborne     April 2005