Current Projects

Currently we are working on these projects and activities:

A garden survey of the Ridgeway and Alvington Way estates. Roman and Anglo-Saxon artifacts have been found in these areas in people's gardens. We are trying to gather as much evidence as possible to try to understand where the Romano-British settlement(s) were in the area and all of this will help. More information is available here.

Reproducing the open field maps for Great and Little Bowden. The enclosure map was lost many years ago and now we are to attempting reproduce it using what sources remain including documents and aerial photography. Some work was done in the past; our team hopes to complete this work. More information is available here.

A study of the medieval churches of Bowden. This includes St Mary-in-Arden, Sts Peter and Paul in Great Bowden, and St Nicholas in Little Bowden. More information is available here.

A study of water and how it shaped the settlement pattern of the area. Water is essential for all life, and understanding where drinking water for people and animals could be found was essential to our encestors. Understanding it will help us to understand them and their lives. More information is available here.

A study of the roads and pathways. What are now muddy footpaths, or just a green dotted line on an Ordnance Survey map may once have been an important highway between settlements. This project hopes to disentangle the ancient tracks of our ancestors to better understand how they communicated with their neighbours. More information is available here.

Understanding the name Bowden. We have it on good authority from the place name experts that this means Bucge's Dun. What is a Dun and who is Bucge? This project aims to find out, More information is available here.

A study of the exsting documentary evidence. Bowden doesn't appear in the written record much before the Domesday survey, taken 20 years after the Conquest, but much can still be learned about the distant past from what was written surprisingly recently. More information is available here.