Marsh

 If you have ever walked along Sandpit Lane – all of it from Sandridge Road to Coopers Green Lane – you will have made at least one observation, that the lane is remarkably straight, in the same way we vision a Roman road to have been straight.  Today, we are pausing close to the roundabout which gives access to the Jersey Farm residential district.  Before the houses came you walked a narrow lane towards the farm and onwards to Sandridge.  But for the moment we will stop at the roundabout.

The couple of hundred metres of House Lane did not exist exactly here before the houses arrived.  Most of the original line of House Lane can still be seen, but it meets Sandpit Lane obliquely behind the three cottages known as Ardens Marsh.

A section of the 1840 tithe map showing the location of Ardens Marsh.
COURTESY HALS

The cottages are revealed on both the 1879 and 1896 surveys (this is 1896).
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

Sandpit Lane follows the bottom edge of the photo.  An upgraded House Lane skirts the modern
housing to a new junction with Sandpit Lane; the former section of House Lane now remains to the north of the cottages.  Some of the houses are built within Ardens Marsh; those on the extreme left in 
the former Ardens Marsh Field.
COURTESY GOOGLE EARTH.

The 1840 tithe map identifies this junction clearly.  We need to look for field number 246.  The map here is very close to the parish boundary, and since it is essentially a parish map nothing of the land north of the broken line – that of Sandridge St Leonard – is shown.  As usual the tithe maps are not oriented northwards but have been moved a quarter turn for a best fit.  Sandpit Lane crosses the lower part of the map before turning towards Smallford.  Today its name is changed to Oaklands Lane after the Coopers Green Lane junction.

Field 246 is different from others on the map in that it is unfenced on the two sides where Sandpit and House lanes pass.  House Lane, incidentally, was at one time known as Hatfield Lane, but possibly not at this end.  The field was named Ardens Marsh, and the rectangular field to its west Ardens Marsh Field.  In the second half of the 19th century these two fields were combined.

View towards Sandpit Lane; the edge of Ardens Marsh.

Ardens Marsh cottages.

The name Ardens is obscure, and has been alternatively known as Hardings – the comparison is logical.  But the Marsh in the name is not as obscure as all that.  This locality lies low in the chalky landscape, a fact made clear as anyone climbing northwards along Coopers Lane will testify.  North along the line of Sandpit Lane, when the water table was significantly higher, have historically appeared a number of springs.  Only Ellenbrook and Boggy Mead Spring remain as surface streams today.  Ardens Marsh was still grass in the 1840s, and even today the roadside ditches are often water filled.

House lane as it was in the early 1900s looking southwards from Sandridge.  This section was known as Hatfield Road or Hatfield Lane.

Between the roundabout and the stub of House Lane which no longer provides access to Sandpit Lane, are the three attached cottages which are collectively called Ardens Marsh.  They didn't exist in 1840 but do appear on the 1879 survey.  Other nearby farm employee cottages were built during the same period: Freelands in Coopers Green Lane, Newgates in Sandpit Lane, Hall Heath also in Sandpit Lane and Beaumonts in Beaumont Avenue.  The need to accommodate key workers and improve on earlier and highly unsuitable arrangements of temporary accommodation within the conglomeration of inadequate farm buildings.  Ardens Marsh cottages were erected and owned by Thomas F Gape, who also owned the nearby Oak Farm.  His land extended to the western end of Ardens Marsh Field, abutting the small and narrow Newgates Farm.

Ardens Way is this locality's connection with the past.

Ardens Marsh carries its name forward to the future as well, for a residential road branching off Barnfield Road has been named Ardens Way.

It's Showtime!

Everyone in the County can mark off this May weekend as soon as they receive their new diaries.  It is the weekend of The Hertfordshire County Show (Herts Show in its abbreviated form).  As this blog is being written the sun is gently warming the Redbourn show ground for its second busy day and lines of cars are being marshalled up in orderly fashion.



It seems that as long as we can remember the Show has set its collective trailers down in fields between the M1 and the old A5 just north of Redbourn for its celebration of most things agricultural – as well as entertainments which would attract the large crowds to ensure the event could cover its costs above the income from trade stands.

Appealing to families.  Courtesy Hertfordshire Life.

However, the Show first arrived at what was to be its permanent home in 1962.  In fact, the statement should be amended to "its second permanent home", in as much as permanence can occasionally be a flexible concept!

The Redbourn show ground.  Courtesy Hertfordshire
Agricultural Society

The society which manages the Show has itself a significant pedigree, having been born in 1801.  Its meetings and events took place on land at Hatfield House estate, and Hertfordshire Agricultural Society pinned the Show's birth to a ploughing match there in 1879.  Although it did move to another Hatfield site the growth of the town made that unexpandable and eventually  unavailable.  In the 1950s the event became nomadic and visited, for example, Childwickbury in 1953 and Letchworth in 1955.

This is where St Albans' Own East End enters the story, for in 1956, shortly after the land had changed hands, Oak Farm in Coopers Green Lane was selected.  The Show came to us!  I'm uncertain when it first became a two-day event at the weekend, but it was previously a single day during the working week, and so it was in 1956.  Thursday was show day.  That was an even bigger weather risk then than today for an open air agri-fest.  Mid May – for it was slightly earlier then – at Oak Farm and the previous day was very wet, so ensuring an adequate amount of mud through which to wallow.  The day itself, according to the Herts Advertiser, was sunny.

The Herts Advertiser reports on the pig classes at Oak Farm.

The requirements for a large tract of land made it inevitable that that the event would be "off the beaten track".  The proportion of visitors with cars would have been low in the 1950s; my memory is unclear about the laying on of special buses to the site.  Perhaps we all walked, but we could only have done so after school.  So perhaps this was an event, which could have been of such wonderful educational value, that passed us by.

I have never discovered a programme for the event, and no-one has recalled the Show as one of their fifties highlights.  Hertfordshire Show at Oak Farm, it seems has retreated to the great chasm of non-memory that exemplifies much of our lives.  But there may be someone somewhere who could still exclaim, "1956?  Oh yes, that was the year Hertfordshire Show came to Oak Farm."