The 1842 Tithe Map of our back yard

After rather a flurry of email correspondence about some problems with the road works in our street, I had a sudden visit from David Drew, our local County and Town Councillor, to check it out for himself. I knew David when I was a Town Councillor and for much of that time he was our MP and a terrific one at that. He has always been a man to help the people and their community, and is very effective at it.

After we'd looked at the 'problem' and had discussions, I took him to the nearby footpath to look out over The Heavens, which has now been bought by a community group to preserve it for posterity and the people of stroud as a wonderful land resource. You may know it from the view out of my window as our house is the closest one to the way into the Heavens. Both David and I have bought shares in this project which has been successful in buying the farmland for about £750,000.

I promised to send David some odd bits of information on my thoughts on how the name evolved. It included this map which shows the way that the names of fields called the 'Havens', gradually became known as 'The Heavens', as everyone calls the valley today. The Havens (derived from the old word Haveden) were old Saxon names for the headlands at the end of a field. The yoked oxen ploughing the field (becoming 'ridge and furrow' land) needed a wide area to gradually turn around in (the Haveden), and then return in parallel lines to form the characteristic S-shape of the 220 yards long furlongs, which were the standard form of such ploughed field systems all over the country.

I love old maps and I found this copy (annotated by hand with the names of the original big landowners at the time) in our library, with the different ownerships hand coloured on the map which produced the rather messy backgrounds. the names of fields are wonderful, and most local people have no idea of them. Our house is built on a piece of land then called The Tindings and Brockwell, with the slope behind our garden fence called Powers Hill.  The various numbers on the map were linked to a list of the occupiers of the particular buildings or land, and were an early form of census.,