Earls Barton Conservation Area Character Appraisal
EARLS BARTON CONSERVATION AREA CHARACTER APPRAISAL 1. ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT 1.1 Earls Barton lies 3½ miles south west of Wellingborough and 6½ miles east north east of Northampton, but set well back (at just over half a mile to the south) from the old road linking these two larger towns. 1.2 Settlement in the central part of Northamptonshire is mostly restricted to the margins of the main valleys of the Nene, Welland and Ise, often on hill tops and spurs well above the floodplains. In common with other villages on either side of the Nene such as Grendon, Cogenhoe, Wollaston and Billing, Earls Barton is perched on a spur of land projecting above the prevailing contours which rise from the river (42m AOD) across extensive ground terraces and then more steeply over outcrops of Upper Lias Clay to a flat-topped ridge of sand and limestone at approximately 100m AOD. (RCHME, 1979). An additional underlying factor in the genesis of the settlement pattern is the customary availability of springs between the 80 and 90 metre contours (AOD), and indeed much of the historic centre of Earls Barton lies within this range. 1.3 However, the village’s unique local topographical feature (with the possible exception of Wollaston castle mount on the other side of the Nene Valley), and clearly its historical raison d’être, is the Scheduled Ancient Monument know as Berry Mount.1 Whereas Victoria County History2 speculates that the landform is “apparently a mote castle”, the RCHME analysis of 1979 suggest that this may not be the case, pointing out that “the relationship between mound and ditch is unusual, especially on the east side where the ditch appears to be turning south- east on an alignment different from the curve of the mound.
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