Buckden is a village and civil parish within the Huntingdonshire district in Cambridgeshire, England. It is north of St Neots and south-west of Huntingdon. It includes the hamlets of Stirtloe and Hardwick. It lies within the historic county of Huntingdonshire, close to the north-south A1 road and the River Great Ouse.
In the centre of the village is Buckden Towers, once Buckden Palace, a residence of the bishops of Lincoln from the 12th to early 19th centuries. Several kings of England stayed there and Catherine of Aragon was held there in 1533 before being moved to Kimbolton Castle in 1534.
Buckden prospered in the 18th and early 19th centuries from being just over north of London on the Great North Road, which was a busy coaching road at the time. The development of the railways in the mid-19th century led to a decline in the population, but it more than doubled in the second half of the 20th century.
History Toponymy Recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Bugedene, Buckden has also been referred to as Buggeden (12–13th centuries), Bokeden (13th–14th centuries), Bukeden (13th–14th centuries), and Bugden (15th–18th centuries), with the present spelling taking over in the 18th century. The name originates from Old English; "Bucge" is a personal name and "dene" an Old English word for valley. The name is still pronounced Bugden locally.
Roman Evidence of Roman settlement was found in 1963–1964 at a quarry site to the east of the village. In 1981, signs of a Roman villa appeared close to the Towers. Excavations in 2006 to the north-east of the village revealed evidence of a Romano-British field system of the 1st–4th centuries CE.
Middle Ages In 1961, excavations uncovered crucibles and crucible fragments that appear to have been used to manufacture white and yellow glass and to date from Anglo-Saxon times. The site of the find was to the north-east of Buckden village, in an area of the Great Ouse valley about to be mined for sand and gravel.
"Bugedene" was listed in the Domesday Book in the Hundred of Toseland, Huntingdonshire. In 1086 there was a single manor at Buckden, whose annual rent of £20 paid to the lord of the manor in 1066 had fallen to £16.10s.
Domesday Book mentions 58 households at Buckden, suggesting a population of 200–300. It states there were 19 ploughlands there in 1086, with capacity for a further one. Apart from that, it had of meadows, of woodland and a water mill. The total manor tax assessment was 20 guilders.
By 1086 the village had a church and priest. The land was then owned by the Bishop of Lincoln, who may already have had a house there. He certainly had one when the Bishop held court by the mid–12th century. In 1227 Henry III granted the Bishop the right to a deer park at Buckden; by the time of a survey in 1647 this covered 425 acres and contained some 200 deer. By the late 17th century the deer were gone and the land enclosed as fields. The deer park lay to the west of the parish.
Buckden later had two manors. The larger was Buckden and the Members, whose lords were the bishops of Lincoln except in brief periods of the 14th, 16th and 17th centuries. The smaller, Buckden Brittains, was the home of the Briton (or Le Briton) family in the 13th century, but later changed hands many times. By the early 19th century, about were owned by the manor of Buckden and the Members and about by the manor of Buckden Brittains.
English kings who stayed at Buckden Palace were Henry III in 1248, Edward I in 1291 and Richard III in 1483. Henry VIII sent Catherine of Aragon to Buckden Palace after the annulment of their marriage (an issue known as the King's Great Matter), from July 1533 to May 1534. He and his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, stayed there in 1541. On Friday 18 June 1641, "hundreds of women and boys, armed with Daggers and Javelins, in a very tumultuous and riotous Manner" entered some land at Buckden owned by the Bishop of Lincoln and "turned in a great herd of cattle".
Georgian period Buckden's site on the Great North Road made it a popular coaching stop in the 18th century. It had four coaching inns. The Lion dates from the 15th century and was enlarged in the 18th. The George Inn, with its courtyard and forge, was remodelled in the 18th century. The Vine dated from the first half of the 17th century and was rebuilt in the 18th to include stables and its own brewery. The Spread Eagle, originating in the 17th century, was altered in the 18th; it had stabling and paddocks. A schedule of 1839 shows six express coaches heading north every day, to Boston, Leeds, Lincoln and York, and as many heading south to London. The presence of elegant Georgian houses in Church Street and the High Street (the former Great North Road) reflects the prosperity brought by its strategic position on the coaching route.
Victorian and modern times In 1854, just 15 years later, Buckden was called "a quiet insignificant place compared to what it was in coaching times", with the advent of the railways. The population, having steadily risen from 869 in 1801 to a peak of 1,291 in 1841, fell to 995 by 1911.
The open fields in Buckden were enclosed by Act of Parliament in 1813. In 1842 a girls' school was opened (a boys' school having existed for over a century) and a new school building built in 1871. A post mill erected in 1830 worked until 1888, when an auxiliary steam engine was installed. The mill was demolished in 1893. Domesday mentions a water mill on the Great Ouse; this was rebuilt about 1850 and converted to steam power in the 1890s. It ran until 1965, and from then until the 1980s was used for crop storage. By 2015, it had been turned into housing.
In the second half of the 20th century, new housing estates in Buckden led to a marked increase in the population.
Governance
Buckden as a civil parish had an elected parish council of 15 members in 2020.Retrieved 18 February 2020. The second tier of governance is Huntingdonshire District Council, a non-metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire. The parish council is based at the village hall on Burberry Road, which was built in 1999.Plaque on the building says it was opened 10 July 1999 by John Major, the local MP.
Buckden is represented on Huntingdonshire District Council by one councillor for the Buckden district ward, which covers the civil parishes of Buckden, Diddington and Southoe and Midloe, and on Cambridgeshire County Council by one councillor for the Buckden, Gransden and The Offords electoral division. It belongs to the parliamentary constituency of Huntingdon County, held since 2015 by Jonathan Djanogly (Conservative).
Buckden was in the historic and administrative county of Huntingdonshire until 1965. From then it was part of a new administrative county of Huntingdon and Peterborough. In 1974, after the Local Government Act 1972, it became a part of Cambridgeshire.
Geography Buckden The village of Buckden lies about west of the River Great Ouse. Between the Great Ouse and Buckden there are a number of disused, flooded gravel quarries. The village lies on sloping ground on the western edge of the river valley. Just to the west is the A1 road, following the route of the Great North Road roughly north and south. Access from the A1 is via a roundabout at the southern edge of Buckden. The western half of the parish slopes gently with low hills.
Hamlets The hamlet of Hardwick is joined to the north-west of Buckden village, but on the western side of the A1. There is a pedestrian subway under the A1 to connect it.
The hamlet of Stirtloe lies to the south of Buckden, separated from the village by of fields.
Geology The village and parish lie on a bedrock of Oxford Clay Formation mudstone of blue-grey or olive-coloured clay formed some 156–165 million years ago in the Jurassic Period. The central area has river terrace deposits of sand and gravel from the Quaternary period, formed up to 3 million years ago by rivers. On the eastern side there are superficial deposits of alluvium (clay, silt, sand and gravel) from up to 2 million years ago in the Quaternary period. The land to the west of the parish is marked by Oadby Member Diamicton, again of the Quaternary period, with rocks formed under Ice Age conditions by glaciers scouring the land in the last 2 million years.
On the western side of the parish, the soil is classed as lime-rich loam and clay with impeded drainage. The central part, where the village lies, has freely draining, slightly acid loamy soil. On the eastern side, the soil is similar, but base-rich and loamy. The farmland in the parish is mainly arable, but with grassland notable in the Great Ouse valley. It lies between and above ordnance datum and covers an area of .
Location
The southern boundary of the parish follows the line of Diddington Brook and the eastern boundary follows the River Great Ouse.
Climate The UK climate, defined like most of north-west Europe as temperate and oceanic, or Cfb under the Köppen climate classification system, (direct: Final Revised Paper) makes Eastern areas such as East Anglia drier, cooler and less windy, with greater daily and seasonal temperature variations. Cambridgeshire has cool onshore coastal breezes further to the east, keeping it warm in summer and cold and frosty in winter.
The nearest Met Office station to Buckden is at Monks Wood near Alconbury, north of Buckden. Average annual rainfall for the UK in 1981–2010 was , but Cambridgeshire is one of the driest counties with about half that amount. Regional weather forecasting and historical summaries are available from the UK Met Office. Additional local weather stations report periodic figures to the internet such as Weather Underground, Inc.
Demography The resident population of the built-up area of Buckden in the 2021 census was 2,753; this is estimated to be 3,010 in 2024.City Popuation, sourced from the UK Office for National Statistics, at https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/eastofengland/cambridgeshire/E63003244__buckden/ The population density was 2,654 per km2). The age distribution shows that 52 are in the age range 18 to 64 abd 27.5% over the age of 65. The mean average number of persons per household was 2.4.
In 2011, 70.2 per cent of Buckden residents were between the ages of 16 and 74 and found potentially economically active. Of these, 67.9 per cent held part-time, full-time or self-employed work, 30.0 per cent were economically inactive (retired, carers, long-term sick and disabled) and 2.0 per cent unemployed. The five main work sectors appear below:
Industry SectorPercentageWholesale and Retail (including repair of motor vehicles)13.1%Human Health and Social Work10.2%Public Administration, Defence and Social Security10.1%Education8.9%Construction8.8%
In 2009, median household income across Cambridgeshire of £32,500 was exceeded by Buckden's £36,900.
The Office for National Statistics has placed the village of Buckden in the Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) called "Huntingdonshire 017C". This was ranked 23,371 out of 32,844 LSOAs in England against the index of multiple deprivation in 2015. It puts Buckden among the 30 per cent least deprived neighbourhoods in England. Much of the civil parish (but excluding the village itself) is in the Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) called "Huntingdonshire 017B", which in 2015, was ranked 29,569 out of 32,844 LSOAs in England against the index of multiple deprivation. This puts the rural part of the parish among the 10 per cent least deprived neighbourhoods in England.