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Great Packington's natural resources. 

General View of the Agriculture of the County of Warwick 1815.png

Credit: Google Books. 

Soil.

In a Adam Murray's General View of the Agriculture of the County of Warwick: with Observations on the Means of Its Improvement, Drawn Up for the Consideration of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, published in 1815, the soil in the Great Packington parish was described as ‘dry sandy loam … well adapted for turnip husbandry.' Kelly's Directory 1915 stated that the chief crops were 'wheat, barley, beans and roots.'

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1815's General View... also recorded how the highest land in the county was at Great Packington and that there were pools of water on the Packington estate.

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The National Gazetteer of Great Britain & Ireland, 1868, reported that there was a quarry of red sandstone within the parish. Between 1995 and 1999 sand and gravel were extracted from land on the Packington Estate. When the quarrying ceased, work began to convert the area into a 22-hectare nature reserve and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) supported the development of a ten-year biodiversity strategy. The reserve opened to the public in 2001. By 2011, 192 bird species had been observed at the site. In 2010, Natural England supported the conversion of a further 16 acres of former farmland at the site into wet grassland.

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Part of the Great Packington parish was included on an Ordnance Survey geological survey map of Birmingham, surveyed in 1911 to 1922 and published in 1924 at 1 inch: 1 mile.

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The orange represents red sandstone and the light yellow indicates aluminium ore.

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​Great Packington's ​Latitude is 52.45° or 52° 27' north and Longitude is -1.65° or 1° 39' west.

Credit: National Library of Scotland.

Water Supply.

The first well house in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, was built on the instruction of the 4th Earl of Aylesford of Packington Hall, following a visit to the local town in 1803.

 

In 1813, the 5th Earl pulled down the 1803 well house to replace it with a larger one. Royal Leamington Spa was rapidly expanding throughout the 1800s from a small village to a thriving spa town. 

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Well House taken in the 1860s. Credit: Warwickshire County Record Office via Our Warwickshire.

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Lord Aylesford's Well, 1822. Credit: Warwickshire County Record Office via Our Warwickshire.

In 1907, Samuel Bretherton, the inspector and surveyor of nuisances for Meriden Rural District Council, gave evidence in support of the Coventry Corporation Water Bill to a committee at the House of Lords. He explained that two of the parishes in the district (not Great Packington) had no piped water supply at all, despite how they should have been receiving water from pipes in Shustoke, Warwickshire. An aqueduct flowed to Great Packington, but the water provided had been condemned by a county analyst as unfit for use and the wells were now enclosed. Lord Aylesford had instructed his agents to work with Mr Bretherton to ensure clean water was supplied to his Great Packington tenants, and it had been arranged for a clean water supply to be available which was only 220 yards from the furthest property. Residents in the other parishes had to go as far as a mile and a half to fetch their water. 

Great Packington is also notable for the number of pools in the parish, many of which are now used by Packington Fisheries. 

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Ordinance Survey mapping often shows information about the pools of water, for example, in this snipped view of the Great Pool where information from 1923 is published in a 1937 map.

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Credit: National Library of Scotland.

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Sources:

  • Cemex.

  • FindMyPast Collection: British Newspapers, 1710-1965.

  • Gren, André. (2019) The Grimy 1800s: Waste, Sewage, & Sanitation in Nineteenth Century Britain. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books.

  • Mapcarta. 

  • Murray, Andrew and the Board of Agriculture. (1815) General View of the Agriculture of the County of Warwick: with Observations on the Means of It's Improvement. London: B. McMillan.

  • The National Collection of Aerial Photography (NCAP).

  • National Library of Scotland Collection: Map Images.

  • Our Warwickshire.

  • Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). 

  • University of Leicester Special Collections: Historical Directories of England & Wales.

  • Warwickshire County Record Office. 

MORE COMING SOON.  

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