Many of our English place names are over a thousand years old and give some idea of the landscape and way of life of our Anglo-Saxon predecessors.
Castle Bromwich was founded by Anglo-Saxon settlers some centuries before the Norman Conquest, that successful invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066. Known initially as Bromwich, the name is Old English; brom wic and means ‘broom farm’.
Brom – Broom, Cytisus scoparius, is a shrub which thrives on the sandy and gravelly soils of glacial drift, materials which were pushed by glaciers down from the north during the last Ice Age which ended ten thousand years ago.
Common across this country and temperate Europe, broom is a shrub which grows well on sandy heathlands as an erect bush between 1 and 1.5 metres in height. It produces long, slender, green branches, profusely covered with bright yellow flowers from April to July. These develop into flat black seed pods which burst audibly when they are ripe, scattering the seeds some distance from the parent plant.
The plant’s name derives from an Anglo-Saxon word simply meaning a ‘thorny shrub’. The straight flexible branches were bundled and tied and used for sweeping houses, hence the modern use of the word. The second element of the name, scoparius comes from the Latin scopae, which also means a broom.
Wic – A subsidiary settlement of an earlier village was often referred to as a wic in Anglo-Saxon times, and it may be that Aston was the original settlement from which Bromwich was founded. Castle Bromwich, until modern times, was part of the extensive ancient manor and parish of Aston, a village which was important enough to have its own priest when the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086.
A little local geology
The lay of the land and make-up of soil have always determined the locations and types of settlements. Castle Bromwich is no exception. Here there is a range of soil types: heavy clay, light sandy soil and alluvium.
As many local gardeners well know, the soil of much of the area around Birmingham, especially to the east, consists of Mercia mudstone, a heavy red clay. Hard as rock in a dry hot summer, its imperviousness to water turns it into a sticky slimy morass in wet weather.
Cutting through the clay, Birmingham’s rivers created wide marshy valleys rich with fertile alluvium, soils created by river silt and rotting plant material. Locally the River Tame and the River Cole were prone to flooding in winter and were difficult to cross at any time. Fords on clay or on marshland were necessary but unsatisfactory, and their locations are often evidenced by place names. Fulford, ‘foul ford’ is common across the country; there was one at Witton on the Tame, another near Sparkhill on the River Cole and the name of Stechford, another crossing of the Cole, probably means ‘sticky ford’.
However, where rivers and streams crossed deposits of glacial drift, the river bed was much firmer and easier to cross. A sandy or gravel riverbed was much easier to negotiate. Travellers in Anglo-Saxon times would recognise better river crossings by place names such as Greet, which contains the Old English word greot meaning gravel, and Gravelly Hill. By choice they would head for fords referring to the plant, broom, which they knew grows on sandy or gravel soil. Medieval travellers would much prefer to cross at Bromwich and Bromford, if they could, rather than at Stechford or Fulford.
The wic element of Bromwich also refers to the geology and topography of the place. A wic was a daughter settlement where livestock, especially cattle, were kept. It may well be that (Castle) Bromwich was established by villagers from Aston who kept their cattle on the floodplains of the River Tame and Cole. The land would often flood in winter but in summer there were lush water meadows, perfect for grazing livestock.
Castle Bromwich had the best of three worlds. Down in the valleys, there were ideal conditions for livestock. On the higher ground, much of which was a mix of sand, gravel and clay in varying amounts, there was lighter tree cover and easier ploughing than on lands lying solely on clay. Close by, on the clay lands, there was the Forest of Arden, a valuable woodland resource providing timber especially of oak and ash, as well as game and grazing for livestock, notably pigs.
After a thousand years, evidence survives
The river valleys are still much in evidence in Castle Bromwich. The Cole Valley is a linear public open space, part of an urban country park following the course of the river from Chelmsley Wood to Solihull Lodge.
The great open fields for growing crops, traditionally a three-year cycle of cereals, legumes and fallow, disappeared at the beginning of the 19th century but were not built on until the 20th century. However, Southfield Avenue is named after the large house at the corner of the Chester Road and Hall Road (now the Remembrance Club) which itself was named after the medieval open field of the same name on which the Hall estate stands.
Vestiges of the ancient woodland of the Forest of Arden also survive with stands of trees on the Park Hall Nature Reserve between the M6 and the River Tame
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