History

“Tiddenfoot” is more than a name – it is a link with the past. People have lived and travelled across this landscape for thousands of years. One of the most important prehistoric routes running from west to east was the thiodweg or Theedway, which crossed the River Ouzel just south of the Park.

About 2,000 years ago, in Roman times, the Theedway became part of the route by which salt was brought south from Droitwich in the Midlands. A thousand years later the crossing was known as Yttingaford, possibly after a person or group of people living nearby. In the year 906AD, King Edward the Elder signed a peace treaty with the Danes of Northumbria and East Anglia here, near a spot adjacent to our park now maintained by Leighton-Linslade Town Council as the "Peace Meadow". Over time the Theedway fell into disuse and much of its route is now only marked by hedgerows and parish and county boundaries. The crossing point of Yttingaford now lies beneath the A4146 bypass, but the name lives on as Tiddenfoot.

Travel further back in time and Tiddenfoot was at the Cretaceous seaside. While dinosaurs roamed dry land about 115 million years ago, this part of Bedfordshire lay at the edge of a shallow sea. The sands and mud of that ancient seaside are now the Lower Greensand, the rock that forms the Greensand Ridge running from Buckinghamshire through Bedfordshire to Cambridgeshire. The sands of the Lower Greensand gave the area around Leighton Buzzard its heaths, and the sand industry quarries such as Tiddenfoot and Grovebury.

Originally sand was transported by horse and cart, but this damaged the roads. After the Grand union Canal opened in 1800 shipping on narrowboats was cheaper and faster, and the railways were even better. But by the 1920s Tiddenfoot’s sand again left by road; sand from Grovebury was loaded into skip wagons on a narrow gauge railway that took the sand over the River Ouzel to a wharf on the east bank of the canal. Remnants of the wharf and track can still be seen today.