Patrick Comerford
During my 10-mile hike a few days ago in south Staffordshire, through parts of Tamworth and villages and hamlets between Tamworth and Lichfield, I stopped halfway along my route at Comberford, having walked there from Wigginton, where I had visited Saint Leonard’s Church and tried to make connections with the centuries-old links with the Comberford family.
I walked the mile or two from Wigginton along Comberford Lane, which becomes Wigginton Lane halfway along its length, through fields and open countryside, to Comberford Hall. Each time I am on the train between Lichfield and Tamworth, I find myself craning my neck to see Comberford Hall. But I also try to get there regularly, and I have known Comberford and Comberford Hall since I was in teens.
After some ‘selfies’ at Comberford Hall and walking through the fields and farms nearby, I went for a stroll through the village and by the banks of the River Tame in the warm mid-day sunshine at the end of last week that felt more like early summer than late spring.
Apart from the now-closed church and some of the houses in Comberford, I was also looking for the site or location of two other places that no longer exist, with the help of a copy of a map of Tamworth produced in 1845: the site of the ‘Old Manor House’ and the site of Comberford Windmill.
I had been shown the site by local residents about 55 years ago, but debate continues about the site of the original hall. The very name of the place indicates that Comberford was a ford or river crossing by the River Tame, and so the original manor house was probably closer to the east bank of the river than the present Comberford Hall.
The 15th-century, half-timbered Comberford Hall, built in 1439 by William Comberford MP, was still standing in the late 18th century, but the Staffordshire historian Stebbing Shaw noted in 1798 that it had been ‘entirely demolished’ by then and that a new house had been built on the site by Lord Donegall. Shaw also said traces of a moated site occupied by an earlier Comberford Hall could be found in a garden to the east of Comberford Hall.
If Shaw is correct in saying the original Comberford Hall stood east of the present Comberford Hall, then both Comberford Hall Cottage and the Coach House may stand on the original site or incorporate parts of the original house.
In the early 1970s, a ridged indentation in one of the fields to the north of the Comberford Hall close to the right of way that leads to Comberford village, was pointed out to me as the site of the original Comberford Hall. However, this contradicts Shaw’s descriptions of an original house east of Comberford Hall, and Valerie Coltman’s insights. Instead, it probably matches the crater shape in the field to the left of the path from Comberford village to Comberford Hall that was known to local children in the 1950s and 1960s as ‘the bomb field’ and caused by a stray bomb during World War II.
A third possible location for the original Comberford Hall may be Comberford Manor Farmhouse, at the north edge of Comberford Village and at the north end of Manor Lane, close to the banks of the river and the flood plane. I have surmised in the past that its location suggests that this mid-18th century farmhouse could be the site of the original Comberford Hall and the centre of the manor once owned by the Comberford family.
However, my 1845 map suggests the site of the old manor house was to the west of Comberford Manor Farmhouse, in fields closer to the east bank of the River Tame, and some distance north-west of the present, 18th century Comberford Hall.
Without the evidence an archaeological survey would produce, I could not adjudicate between the merits for the four suggestions for site of the original manor house: to the east of Comberford Hall (Stebbing Shaw); the site of the present Comberford Hall (Valerie Coltman); Comberford Manor Farmhouse; or the fields by the east bank the Tame, slightly west of the village (1845 map).
The other place I was searching for, and whose location on the 1845 map is Comberford Windmill, on the north side of Coton Lane, close to Comberford Crossroads, where Coton Lane and Gillway Lane meet at the junction with Comberford Road, immediately north of Tamworth, on the road towards Hopwas.
Windmill Farm is now within the boundaries of Tamworth, but was once part of what is now Wigginton and Hopwas civil parish, within the bounds of Lichfield District Council.
Windmill Farm was farmed by Frank and Kathleen Aucote, with their daughters Christine and Margaret, from 1944 to 1963, who were tenants of a Mr Heath who lived in New Zealand. They were market gardeners and also kept a herd of Friesian dairy cattle, and their land stretched from the Comberford Road towards Comberford and along Coton Lane to the railway.
Windmill Farm was sold in 1963, and the Aucote family moved to Nottinghamshire. It has been the home of the Sketchley family for many decades, since the late 1970s or early 1980s. A a few years before they moved in, the farmer had removed the stone and clay foundations of the windmill from the field and dragged them down to the bottom field on the farm.
Oxford Archaeology (OA) undertook a programme of archaeological investigation in April and May 2017 in advance of a residential development at Windmill Farm. Eleven trenches were opened. Five contained one or two linear ditches that were either undated, or post-mediaeval or modern. The southern-most trench contained a ditch and pit containing middle Roman pottery, and a further undated ditch.
In its excavations, Oxford Archaeology has found a substantial part of a Romano-British farmstead composed of a complex of rectilinear enclosures that was lived in during the second and third centuries. Two phases were identified, the settlement having been extended and additional enclosures added to the north and east around the middle of the second century.
The latter phase included the construction of a post-built aisled building, and two discrete dumps of burnt crop-processing debris attested to the crops people cultivated there. A notable find was a Samian Dragendorff 37 bowl decorated with an erotic scene.
The archaeological investigation at Coton Lane was the first substantial excavation of a Romano-British settlement in the Tamworth area, the only previous excavation being limited trenching of a cropmark site at Lichfield Road Industrial Estate, 600 metres to the south. Indeed, understanding of the Roman period in Staffordshire as a whole has been hampered by a lack of large-scale excavations and a concentration on the few villas and on military sites or small settlements.
In addition to the site at Lichfield Road Industrial Estate, the cropmark evidence from the Tame Valley includes a complex of at least four rectilinear enclosures and possible roundhouses that may provide evidence for a densely settled landscape in the Coton Lane area.
The digs also uncovered part of a mediaeval settlement that, was abandoned in the late 14th century, possibly because of the Black Death. In the 1980s, a local resident using a metal detector around the original location of the mill, in the field on the left of the drive up to the house, reportedly found some coins, including two Elizabethan silver shillings.
All of this was discovered beneath land that is now part of Tamworth’s modern landscape, and helps to understand the historical context of Comberford, even long before the Comberford family lived in this part of Staffordshire.
As I walked from Windmill Farm along Coton Lane, I could see how in recent years much of the farmland on the north side of Coton Lane, between Tamworth and Comberford, has been developed as housing in recent decades.
I continue on west, across the River Tame and the Coventry Canal, to Hopwas, where I wanted to see Saint Chad’s Church and the village, to walk by the canal pathway and to have a very late lunch.
But more about Hopwas, hopefully, in days to come.
Walking by the banks of the River Tame in Comberford (Patrick Comerford, 2026)
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